Things to do with text

As a type designer, I'm mainly involved in the business of making text visible and trying 
to get it to display correctly. I'm going to be speaking at a conference in January* and 
as background for my talk I'm interested in cataloguing the other things that people do, 
or want to do, with computerised text. It strikes me that many of these things take place 
in the realm in which text is 'invisible', i.e. prior to or independent of display. Some 
of these things are obvious in a general sense (spelling and grammar checking, sorting, 
comparing), but I'd like to come up with some specific and interesting examples -- 
particularly of a scholarly nature --, and also would like know of any other things that 
people 'do with text' beyond displaying it. I suspect that there are things I have not 
even imagined within my narrow focus.

John Hudson

* http://www.bibletechconference.com/

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Tiro Typeworks        www.tiro.com
Gulf Islands, BC      [email protected]

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