Omega Becomes a Sign Processor
Yannis Haralambous, Gábor Bella · 2005
is a rather new issue in computing, although the problem is as old as humanity: our species turns out to be a writing one because, amongst other things, our brain is able to interpret images as symbols belonging to a given writing system. Computers deal with text in a more abstract way. When we agree that, in computing, all possible “capital A ” letters are represented by the number 65, then we cut short all information on how a given instance of capital letter A is drawn. Modern computing jargon describes this process as “going from glyphs to characters.” If a glyph is the image of a writing system’s atomic unit, a character is an interpretation of that image, an interpretation shared by many glyphs drawn by different people in different places at different times.