Specifications
Glossary
Glossary of Terms
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45541L-004 Rev. A ZPL II Programming Guide 9/15/06
Glossary of Terms
ASCII American Standard Code for Information Interchange. A 7-bit character set that
includes Latin characters, as well as control and punctuation characters.
bidirectional text layout The arrangement of characters with mixed directionality on a
single line. For example, English and Arabic.
big-endian In the encoding, the most significant byte is stored first.
byte order mark BOM; indicates big-endian (BE) or little-endian (LE).
character The smallest component of a writing system that has understanding, refers to the
abstract meaning not the specific shape.
character code Another term for code point.
character set A collection of characters.
coded character set An ordered collection of characters that are assigned an integral
reference number.
code point An integral reference number assigned to a character.
coded character set An ordered collection of characters that are assigned an integral
reference number.
combining semantic cluster Consists of an atomic character, a combining character
sequence consisting of a base character plus one or more nonspacing marks, enclosing marks,
combining word joiner, such as an Indic virama, or a sequence of Hangul jamos equivalent to a
Hangual syllable. .
diacritic A mark that is added to a letter or other character to change its value or meaning.
encoding The mapping of a characters code points to a sequence of bytes used to represent
the data.
font An electronic collection of glyphs used for the visual representation of characters.
GB18030 A standard required by the People’s Republic of China for operating systems of
non-handheld computers.
GB 2312 A Chinese character set and encoding.
glyph The visual representation of a character, such as a shape or image.
grapheme cluster Consists of an atomic character, a combining character sequence
consisting of a base character plus one or more nonspacing marks or enclosing marks, or a
sequence of Hangul jamos equivalent to a Hangul syllable.
ISO 10646 An international standard that defines the Universal Character Set (UCS) and a
character encoding. The UCS matches Unicode.