Text is one of the most fundamental things people work with when using a computer. Yet there's a lot more to text than meets the eye - text encodings, codepages, scancodes, font hinting and kerning, complex script handling, endianness, OS-dependent line endings, extended ASCII for drawing "pictures" in text, control "characters", etc., etc. I'd have to learn a fair bit in order to make a good article on it, but should I try and write an article on what a computer's idea of "text" is and the history behind it?

#text #computers #linux #windows #macos #classicmac #retrocomputing #msdos #unicode #fonts #hardware