International character font
Accent marks (sometimes referred to simply as accents) and accented characters are important elements in both written and spoken language, and, by extension, in typography. While their use in English is largely confined to proper names or “borrowed” words of foreign origin, such as résumé and tête-à-tête, they occur frequently in several other European languages, including Spanish, French, Italian, German and Portuguese. The most common accents are the acute (é grave (è circumflex (â, î or ô tilde (ñ umlaut and dieresis (ü or ï – the same symbol is used for two different purposes and cedilla (ç). Accent marks (also referred to as diacritics or diacriticals) usually appear above a character. One exception is the cedilla, which appears directly underneath the letter c; several less common accent marks appear next to the character. Several “borrowed” foreign words containing accents are shown above. In some instances, the accent is optional in English once the word has become part of common usage. These small yet significant symbols indicate pronunciation, including emphasis. In some instances, the accent mark also clarifies the meaning of a word, which might be different without the accent. With names and other proper nouns, neglecting to include the correct accent marks can be seen as a sign of disrespect. These two words – one with and one without the accent – have different, yet related meanings. The first describes an action, and the second, a divorced man. A divorced woman is a divorcée. Most professional-quality fonts include both a range of individual, floating accents and composite or prebuilt accented characters. Floating accents are used to create accented characters on-the-fly, while the prebuilt version is used as-is. Basic Open Type® fonts as well older Type1 and True Type fonts have a standard set of the most commonly used accents and accented.
Intended audience: content authors, users, and anyone who is unsure about what a character encoding is, and wants a brief summary of how it affects them. Question What is a character encoding, and why should I care? Answer First, why should I care? If you use anything other than the most basic English text, people may not be able to read the content you create unless you say what character encoding you used. For example, you may intend the text to look like this: but it may actually display like this: Not only does lack of character encoding information spoil the readability of displayed text, but it may mean that your data cannot be found by a search engine, or reliably processed by machines in a number of other ways. So what's a character encoding? Characters that are needed for a specific purpose are grouped into a character set (also called a repertoire). ( To refer to characters in an unambiguous way, each character is associated with a number, called a code point.) The characters are stored in the computer as one or more bytes. So, when you input text using a keyboard or in some other way, the character encoding maps characters you choose to specific bytes in computer memory, and then to display the text it reads the bytes back into characters. Unfortunately, there are many different character sets and character encodings, ie. many different ways of mapping between bytes, code points and characters. The section Additional information provides a little more detail for those who are interested. Most of the time, however, you will not need to know the details. You will just need to be sure that you consider the advice in the section How does this affect me? below. How do fonts fit into this? A font is a collection of glyph definitions, ie. definitions of the shapes used to display characters. Once your browser or app has worked out what characters it is dealing.