User:Bunny-crunch/Characters for proofreaders

For non-technical proofreaders, there are a few concepts about "characters" that can become mixed up. This is an effort to clarify them. Additional information is included in boxes, which may be helpful, but can be skipped over if it is too technical.

What is a character?

In processing text in digital form, a character is the most basic unit we work with. A character can be a letter, a symbol, a punctuation mark⁠—even a space. One important thing to remember is that the abstract idea of a character always stays the same. A letter "d" may be printed large or small, simple or ornate⁠—but it's still a letter "d".

Unicode provides a standardized way to reference a vast number of different named characters (Over 140,000 in version 13).

Here at DP, we use character suites to constrain ourselves to only certain subsets of characters that are useful for the books we work on.

Display

How a character is displayed on a screen, or printed on paper depends on various settings and what font is being used. A font dictates the shape and style of a character⁠—how it appears, what form it takes, even whether you see it at all (a font may not contain all characters we want to view.)

Note that we have developed our own proofing font, DP Sans Mono.

It is designed to make our job easier, to make characters clearly distinct from one another, and contain all the characters currently used in our character suites.

Input

Most of the commonly used characters in books we work on can be input by typing the corresponding key on a computer keyboard. Also, the proofing interface contains character pickers, where you can select from all the characters available to use in the project. Depending on your system, you may have other methods to input characters (such as keyboard combinations or virtual keyboards on a tablet).

For characters that take the form of Latin letters with diacritical marks, note that we have a specific way you can represent them at DP, as described in the Proofreading Guidelines.

When you enter the final ] the correct character will automatically replace the markup, if it is included in one of the character suites for the project. This can also serve as an alternate way to input such characters.