How Computers Make Books

3 Storing words

• Representing letters as numbers so computers can process them
• Working with text formatting such as bold and italic
• The Unicode^TM standard for the world’s lanuages and writing systems

We have added lines and curves to our repertoire in the previous chapter. Now let’s look at storing and manipulating text.

Computers deal only in numbers. These numbers are processed in various ways, with no particular meaning assigned to them. However, we like to assign meaning, so we use a code to say which number means what. For example, we might set 0 = A, 1 = B, 2 = C, etc. This code exists only in our heads and our computer programs—the computer itself still sees just numbers. From the very beginning, computers have been used to process ...