6. Glossary

Byte Order This all has to do with how data larger than a byte is actually stored in memory. The CPU expects 16bit and 32bit, and larger, data to be ordered in one of the two ways listed below. SDL has macros which you can use to detemine which endianness your program will be using. Big-Endian(MSB) means the most significant byte comes first in storage. Sparc and Motorola 68k based chips are MSB ordered. (SDL defines this as SDL_BYTEORDER==SDL_BIG_ENDIAN) Little-Endian(LSB) is stored in the opposite order, with the least significant byte first in memory. Intel and AMD are two LSB machines. (SDL defines this as SDL_BYTEORDER==SDL_LIL_ENDIAN)

LATIN1 Latin-1 is an extension of ASCII, where ASCII only defines characters 0 through 127. Latin-1 continues and adds more common international symbols to define through character 255. ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1) Unicode Table (pdf)

Hinting Font hinting is the use of mathematical instructions to adjust the display of an outline font so that it lines up with a rasterized grid. At small screen sizes, with or without antialiasing, hinting is critical for producing a clear, legible text for human readers.

Kerning Kerning is the process of spacing adjacent characters apart depending on the actual two adjacent characters. This allows some characters to be closer to each other than others. When kerning is not used, such as when using the glyph metrics advance value, the characters will be spaced out at a constant size that accomodates all pairs of adjacent characters. This would be the maximum space between characters needed. There's currently no method to retrieve the kerning for a pair of characters from SDL_ttf, However correct kerning will be applied when a string of text is rendered instead of individual glyphs.