GRAVITY THIRTEEN -- Monday, September 29, 1992

Text is a series of discrete symbols.

The word 'discrete' is important. It's what makes text different from the other three aspects of information: image, sound, and system.

'Discrete' means that it doesn't matter if the sentence "I need to find a job" is scribbled on a bar napkin, displayed on the Times Square billboard sign, written in sand with a stick, or sandblasted real real big on the moon.

It's still the same sentence, providing that the symbols which comprise it are legible, and the reader knows how to make sense of them.

Text is linear. This may come as a surprise to those of us taught from
a young age to read page after page of words in a book. The manner in which words are arranged can most certainly alter their meaning, as any poet will tell you, but for our purposes text is linear.

Think of one of those electronic marquee signs. Each letter appears on
a single line screen, goes around the block, and disappears.

Or think of a stock-market tickertape... long strips of paper, just wide
enough to hold a single line of text, completely covering the bedroom floor of Mr. Cigar-Smoking Big Deal Financier too caught up in the news of his holdings to pay much attention to floozy blonde he's cheating on his wife with, all curled up in his bed, waiting for him.

Now imagine, say Ulysses, all 783 pages of it, printed out the same way on that tickertape, or flashing by forever on the Radio City marquee.

Yes, it'd be hard to follow (it's hard now). But it'd be possible.

Just to keep people standing on that Radio City sidewalk (yea right!), we oughtta throw in some non-Ulysses format specifiers: <NEW CHAPTER>, <BIG SCARY TYPE>, <OFFSET QUOTE>, <HUGE IMPRESSIVE FIRST LETTER>, and of course <NEW PARAGRAPH>.

New paragraph. We do need a way to tell people that a new paragraph has started. (This brings to mind an image of a sharply dressed American officer on the phone with Western Union, dictating a message to his beloved: "I love you, stop. Don't marry the butcher's brother, stop. I'm sailing home tomorrow on the Titanic, stop.")

We need a discrete way to break up the sequence of symbols. In programming parlance, we use what are called control-codes. There's thirty-three of them. Although you cannot usually see them, control-codes are taken to be part of the text. The control-code commonly used to seperate strings of words into paragraphs is called the CARRIAGE RETURN. Other control-codes are FORM FEED,
which causes a new page to be started, and TAB, which inserts a set amount of space on a line. One very important control-code is used to signify that we've reached the end, the END OF FILE code.

Gravity uses only three of the standard control-codes for its text items:
SPACE, CARRIAGE RETURN, and EOF. All other formatting is specified by system items such as <BIG SCARY TYPE> and <HUGE IMPRESSIVE FIRST LETTER>.

(By the way... is SPACE really a control-code? Or is it a character?)

Tomorrow: images.

From: Richard Redd , Bob Barnes , Bob Barnes
To: Jim Frakes