1.1 Glossary

This document uses the following terms:

American National Standards Institute (ANSI) character set: A character set defined by a code page approved by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). The term "ANSI" as used to signify Windows code pages is a historical reference and a misnomer that persists in the Windows community. The source of this misnomer stems from the fact that the Windows code page 1252 was originally based on an ANSI draft, which became International Organization for Standardization (ISO) Standard 8859-1 [ISO/IEC-8859-1]. In Windows, the ANSI character set can be any of the following code pages: 1252, 1250, 1251, 1253, 1254, 1255, 1256, 1257, 1258, 874, 932, 936, 949, or 950. For example, "ANSI application" is usually a reference to a non-Unicode or code-page-based application. Therefore, "ANSI character set" is often misused to refer to one of the character sets defined by a Windows code page that can be used as an active system code page; for example, character sets defined by code page 1252 or character sets defined by code page 950. Windows is now based on Unicode, so the use of ANSI character sets is strongly discouraged unless they are used to interoperate with legacy applications or legacy data.

ASCII: The American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) is an 8-bit character-encoding scheme based on the English alphabet. ASCII codes represent text in computers, communications equipment, and other devices that work with text. ASCII refers to a single 8-bit ASCII character or an array of 8-bit ASCII characters with the high bit of each character set to zero.

big-endian: Multiple-byte values that are byte-ordered with the most significant byte stored in the memory location with the lowest address.

bitmap: A collection of structures that contain a representation of a graphical image, a logical palette, dimensions and other information.

color matching: The conversion of a color, sent from its original color space, to its visually closest color in the destination color space. See also Image Color Management (ICM).

delta font: Partial TrueType and OpenType font that contains new glyphs to be merged with data from a previous subset font definition.

design vector: A set of specific values for the font axes of a multiple master font.

device: Any peripheral or part of a computer system that can send or receive data.

dithering: A form of digital halftoning.

embedded font: A font that is attached to a document so that the font can be used wherever the document is used, regardless of whether the font is installed on the system.

encapsulated PostScript (EPS): A file of PostScript raw data that describes the appearance of a single page. Although EPS data can describe text, graphics, and images; the primary purpose of an EPS file is to be encapsulated within another PostScript page definition.

enhanced metafile format (EMF): A file format that supports the device-independent definitions of images.

enhanced metafile format plus extensions (EMF+): A file format that supports the device-independent definitions of images.

enhanced metafile spool format (EMFSPOOL): A format that specifies a structure of enhanced metafile format (EMF) records used for defining application and device-independent printer spool files.

font association: The automatic pairing of a font that contains ideographs with a font that does not contain ideographs. Font association is used to maintain font attributes across changes in locale and allows the user to enter ideographic characters regardless of which font is selected.

font axis: A property of font design that can assume a linear range of values. In general, a font has multiple axes. For example, a font may define an axis for weight, along which range the possible values for that property.

font mapper: An operating system component that maps specified font attributes to available, installed fonts on the system.

glyph: A graphical representation of a character, a part of a character, or a sequence of characters, in a font used for graphical output.

Graphics Device Interface (GDI): An API, supported on 16-bit and 32-bit versions of the operating system, that supports graphics operations and image manipulation on logical graphics objects.

Image Color Management (ICM): Technology that ensures that a color image, graphic, or text object is rendered as closely as possible to its original intent on any device despite differences in imaging technologies and color capabilities between devices.

inclusive-inclusive: When referring to the bounds of a rectangle that consist of two coordinates—one coordinate for one corner and the other coordinate for the opposite corner inclusive-inclusive means that the coordinates are part of the rectangle. If not inclusive-inclusive, the coordinates are not part of the rectangle and instead are one logical unit outside the bounds of the rectangle along both coordinate axes.

little-endian: Multiple-byte values that are byte-ordered with the least significant byte stored in the memory location with the lowest address.

metafile: A sequence of record structures that store an image in an application-independent format. Metafile records contain drawing commands, object definitions, and configuration settings. When a metafile is processed, the stored image can be rendered on a display, output to a printer or plotter, stored in memory, or saved to a file or stream.

OpenGL: A software API for graphics hardware that supports the rendering of multidimensional graphical objects. The Microsoft implementation of OpenGL for the Windows operating system provides industry-standard graphics software for creating high-quality still and animated three-dimensional color images. See [OPENGL] for further information.

OpenType: A Unicode-based font technology that is an extension to TrueType and Type 1 font technologies. OpenType allows PostScript and TrueType glyph definitions to reside in a common container format.

page description language (PDL): The language for describing the layout and contents of a printed page. Common examples are PostScript and Printer Control Language (PCL).

port: A TCP/IP numbered connection point that is used to transfer data.

PostScript: A page description language developed by Adobe Systems that is primarily used for printing documents on laser printers. It is the standard for desktop publishing.

print job: The rendered page description language (PDL) output data sent to a print device for a particular application or user request.

print server: A machine that hosts the print system and all its different components.

printer driver: The interface component between the operating system and the printer device. It is responsible for processing the application data into a page description language (PDL) that can be interpreted by the printer device.

region: A graphics object that is nonrectilinear in shape and is defined by an array of scanlines.

soft font: A font that is downloaded from an external source, such as a disk or system, to a printer prior to printing.

spool file: A representation of application content data than can be processed by a printer driver. Common examples are enhanced metafile format and XML Paper Specification (XPS) [MSDN-XMLP]. For more information, see [MSDN-META].

spool file format: The specific representation that is used in an instance of a spool file. Common examples for spool file formats are enhanced metafile spool format (EMFSPOOL) [MS-EMFSPOOL] and XML Paper Specification (XPS) [MSDN-XMLP]. For more information, see [MSDN-SPOOL].

stock object: A predefined graphics object. Stock objects are standard, commonly used objects, such as a black brush and pen. The set of predefined stock objects is specified in [MS-EMF] section 2.1.31. Stock objects are neither created nor deleted.

subset font: A subset of TrueType and OpenType fonts, which can be merged to form more complete fonts. Subset fonts are embedded in metafiles in order to save space. Information is present only for the characters that are actually used in a document.

TrueType: A scalable font technology that renders fonts for both the printer and the screen.  Each TrueType font contains its own algorithms for converting printer outlines into screen bitmaps, which means both the outline and bitmap information is rasterized from the same font data. The lower-level language embedded within the TrueType font allows great flexibility in its design. Both TrueType and Type 1 font technologies are part of the OpenType format.

TrueType font: A type of computer font that can be scaled to any size. TrueType fonts are clear and readable in all sizes and can be sent to any printer or other output device.

Type 1 font: A public, standard type format originally developed for use with PostScript printers. Type 1 fonts contain two components—the outline font, used for printing; and the bitmap font set, used for screen display.

typeface: The primary design of a set of printed characters such as Courier, Helvetica, and Times Roman. The terms typeface and font are sometimes used interchangeably. A font is the particular implementation and variation of the typeface such as normal, bold, or italics. The distinguishing characteristic of a typeface is often the presence or absence of serifs.

Unicode: A character encoding standard developed by the Unicode Consortium that represents almost all of the written languages of the world. The Unicode standard [UNICODE5.0.0/2007] provides three forms (UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32) and seven schemes (UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-16 BE, UTF-16 LE, UTF-32, UTF-32 LE, and UTF-32 BE).

UTF-16LE: The Unicode Transformation Format - 16-bit, Little Endian encoding scheme. It is used to encode Unicode characters as a sequence of 16-bit codes, each encoded as two 8-bit bytes with the least-significant byte first.

weight: The property of a font that specifies the degree of emphasis or boldness of the characters.

Windows metafile format (WMF): A file format used by Windows that supports the definition of images, including a format for clip art in word-processing documents.

MAY, SHOULD, MUST, SHOULD NOT, MUST NOT: These terms (in all caps) are used as defined in [RFC2119]. All statements of optional behavior use either MAY, SHOULD, or SHOULD NOT.