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Font Encoding Standards

What is a character set?

A character set is a collection of symbols in a specific order. Some common character sets are ASCII and ISO Latin 1.

What is an encoding vector?

The term ``encoding vector'' is most frequently heard in the context of PostScript fonts. An encoding vector embodies a particular character set, it is simply the list of all the characters in the character set in the order in which they occur.

Most font technologies limit a particular encoding to 256 characters; an Adobe Type 1 font, for example, may contain an arbitrary number of characters, but no single encoding vector can contain more than 256.

Some common encodings are:

• Adobe Standard Encoding - the default encoding of many PS Type1 fonts
• Apple Standard Encoding - the default encoding on a Mac
• US ASCII - seven bit ASCII
• ISO Latin-1 - an eight bit multi-national character set encoding
• Cork Encoding - the TeX community's eight bit standard
• FC - an eight bit encoding for African languages
• TeX text - the TeX community's seven bit defacto standard (CMR)

Where can I get them?

You can get tables showing the layout of many standard character sets from the Kermit distribution (via anonymous ftp from watsun.cc.columbia.edu in /kermit/charsets.

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Excerpted from The comp.fonts FAQ, Copyright © 1992-96 by Norman Walsh