Comments about oreilly Fonts & Encodings:

Yannis Haralambous is well known in the TeX community, not only for his work on Omega, a proposed successor to TeX, but also for his numerous contributions as a developer of fonts for various languages. It only seems fitting that Yannis has undertaken the task of writing a comprehensive book on the topic of fonts and encodings.

This book is quite impressive, not only regarding its size, but also regarding the broad range of topics covered as well as the depth of the coverage and the level of detail. It covers everything you ever wanted to know about fonts and encodings, including the messy bits you don't really want to know.

Considering the size of the book, it is understandable that several years have passed from the time of writing the original manuscript in French to the publication of the English translation. Unfortunately, because of thi delays, some chapters are not as up-to-date as one could have wished.

While this is not much of a problem for most of the reference chapters about encodings or font file formats, it is very regrettable for the TeX community that the chapter about fonts in TeX has completely missed or overlooked some very important developments of the last few years, such as pdfTeX, the Latin Modern and TeX Gyre fonts, or XeTeX (which is a TeX engine that offers support for Unicode and OpenType fonts).

To be fair, one has to admit that the success and importance of these recent developments in the TeX world could not have been foreseen at the time of writing. Nevertheless, it could have been possible to include some additions and/or revisions by the time of the English translation of 2007.

It is rather unfortunate that the opportunity for updates was missed, which would have made the book even more useful and valuable for TeX users. Despite these shortcomings, the book remains a valuable resource for anyone deeply interested in font technology and encodings.

Comments about oreilly Fonts & Encodings:

I've learned quite a lot about "the way things are" in computing by reading the first 50 pages of this entertaining book. Haramlambous' work is translated by P. Scott Horne. I'm not sure what language the original work is in, but this is a very readable book that covers the fundamental tryst between fonts and encodings. Encodings help us understand characters while fonts make those characters familiar glyphs (letters and symbols).

Haramlambous has shed light on every corner of this problem. He starts with a refresher in type setting and a primer in the language of fonts. From there, he discusses the history of encodings including an illustrative expose comparing the punchcard and EBCDIC and how they share the same encoding scheme.

As a first edition, there are plenty of errata issues that need to be addressed, but this massive tome will be a long-lived reference in my library.