Glossary of terms related to documentation, typography and printing
Alphabetic lists of glossary entries are provided in these languages:
Deutsche
einträge
English
entries
Titres
Français
Scope of this glossary; purpose of any glossary; special notations and scopes; sources used for this glossary; links to related glossaries (not yet).
This work started before Wikipedia came to life. Nowadays you may get very
good answers about typographic issues starting at de.wikipedia.orgi or
en.wikipedia.org or
even
fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typographie.
Find a term
Please use the Search page (the magnifying glass icon in navigation row) for the site of D+DD to search for a term in the glossary. You may wish to use the term glossary in conjuntion with the search term: "glossary + compass" to avoid arbitrary answers.
Scope
The scope of this glossary is document processing, terminology, publishing, typography and character coding. From the area of hyper-documents only few terms are defined.
This glossary is in English (well, sort of). Translations of terms are provided as entry with references to the English definition.
Purpose of (any)
glossary
The purpose of any glossary is to overcome the threat which mankind perpetuates since the days of Babel. In Genesis, chapter 11, verses 7 to 9 we read:
Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they
may not understand one another's speach.
So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth,
and they left off to build the city.
Therefore is the name of it called Babel, because the Lord did there confound
the language of all the earth; and from thence did the Lord scatter them
abroad upon the face of all the earth.
Special notations
= abc | provides the long form of abbreviations and buzzwords |
(adj|adv|n|prep|v) | adjective | adverb | noun | preposition | verb |
(pl) | plural |
[abc] | Scope or defining authority of this term (see below) |
Scopes
ANSI | Definition by American National Standards Institute |
com | Communications, data transfer |
GUI | Graphical User Interface |
hyp | Hypter-text, hyper-media, help systems |
IBM | Term used in IBM environments, coined by IBM |
ISO | Definition by International Standards Organisation |
lex | Definitions from lexicon |
org | Organisation, structures |
pub | Publications, typography, printing trade |
sys | Programming, computer systems, operating systems |
Sources
This glossary is based on the author's collection of articles from various typographic publications, such as:
- Xerox Corporation: Desktop Publishing Standards, Desk Top Publishing Glossary. 1991
- Desktop Publishing. User Publications Inc. 1985
When ever possible, these are stated explicitly and links are provided.
Further links
This entry will need quite a bit of research...