Drawing Strings


The Spoken and Written Words


The Speech

Our most common means of communicating with other people is through the spoken words. This is the type taught very early to babies and infants. For two people A and B to effectively communicate with speech, they must use words that are common to them. There could be other words spoken by two different individuals C and D and that people A and B do not understand. The group of words that two people A and B use to understand each other is called a language. Each language has a name, such as Latin or Aramaic. One or more new languages can be derived from an existing language. Just as done for a C# class, the newly derived language can modify some words of the parent language and can add new language.

One of the limitations of the spoken word is that we must be interacting, somehow directly, with the other person and, after the conversation is over, except for our memory, the whole speech is physically lost, and there is no physical reference that the conversation took place.

An Alphabet and its Letters

Another type of communication, which is sometimes an addition, sometimes an alternative, is the written word. To make this possible, a long time ago (hundreds and sometimes thousands of years ago), a group of symbols were created so that each symbol would have a particular role and meaning. The group of symbols is understandable to a particular language and the group of symbols is called an alphabet. Like everything else, an alphabet has a name, and the name of the alphabet is related to its corresponding language. For example, there is such a thing as the English alphabet. There is the French alphabet, and the German alphabet.

One of the particularities of a regular alphabet is that it must have a specific way to represent its primary basic symbols. In English, the basic symbols are A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, and Z. There are two ways to represent a letter (in most Western languages): uppercase and lowercase.

Besides the regular letters of an alphabet, when creating or representing the written words, a language can add some signs to some words. This can assist in the pronunciation or the variations, which can subsequently make the language richer. For example, both the English and the French languages use the same alphabet, but the French language adds some signs to some of its letters. Examples are: Ma marâtre est peut-être a côté du tronçon fluvial. Many other languages, derived from Latin or not, use this type of mechanism to complement their communication.

As mentioned already, the letters used in the alphabet and the digits used to represent numbers were created a long time ago. The people who created them designed a standard way of representing the letters. For example, they decided that the letter A would be represented as A. A few (hundred) years later, as aesthetic representation was developed to make things look good, some variations of representing the same letter were created. For example, here are three representations the the same word:

  • State
  • State
  • State

Notice that the S on each word is different. With the advent of computers, new demands for better and more sophisticated techniques of representing words were needed.

The Digits

The letters of an alphabet are typically used to create or represent spoken words. To count, to measure, to represent numbers, or to perform calculations, other symbols were created. The Latin-based languages use the symbols 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9. Because there are 10 of them, they are referred to as digits. While most (or rather many) languages, including non-Latin-based languages, use or borrow these digits, some other languages use other means of representing numbers.

In spoken words, each of these symbols has a specific name.

To create a represent a number, you use one or a combination of digits.

Getting a Font

A font is an abstract (non-physical) object used to draw some symbols on paper, a computer monitor, or another device (PDA, oscillator, etc).

A font is created by a graphic artist or developed by a corporation. Once the font has been designed, it is created as a computer application and must be installed in the device that will use it. This means that the font must be installed in the computer, the printer, or the device that can then use it. This also means that there are various ways you can get a font to your device. Most computer-related objects (PCs, printers, oscillators, PDAs, etc) come with one or more fonts already installed. You can also purchase a font and install it on a computer. You can also download a free font from the Internet and install it.


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