Specifications

Figure 1 Examples of previewing three TrueType scalable typefaces: monospaced (Century Schoolbook
Monospace BT; upper left), sans-serif (Lucida Sans Regular; lower center), and serif (Bookman Old Style;
upper right).
Technically, the term font refers to a typeface at a particular size, usually measured in points (72
points equals one inch). 10-point Courier and 12-point Courier would be considered two separate
fonts. This is because in traditional printing and in the first PC printers, each size of a particular type-
face was a separate entity. On an old-time printing press, each character on a page was printed by a
separate wood or metal slug that would be pressed against the paper to make an impression. Slugs of
different sizes were needed to produce different sized characters. In the same way, printers originally
used bitmaps to create type. In this printing technique, every character of a typeface exists as a sepa-
rate pattern of dots ready to be sent to the printer. In essence, each character existed as an individual,
tiny graphic. To print the same typeface at various sizes requires individual graphics for each size.
These are called bitmap fonts.
Today, printers nearly always use scalable fonts. This is a technology in which a typeface requires only
a single outline for each character to produce type of any size. The printer retains the outline in mem-
ory and generates bitmaps of the text characters at the size required for each job. The bitmaps are
stored in a temporary font cache, but only for the duration of the job. The printer also can rotate a
scalable font to any angle, whereas bitmaps can be rotated only in 90° increments. Outline fonts take
up less memory space in the printer and provide a wider range of variations for each typeface. Also,
because they use what amounts to a vector graphic technology, scalable fonts can take advantage of
the printer’s full resolution, whereas bitmap fonts look the same at any resolution. The drawback to
scalable fonts is that they require more processing power from the print engine, but when compared
to the advantages they offer, this is a small sacrifice.
Note
Although bitmap fonts are seldom used any longer for normal business documents, some professionals prefer them for cer-
tain high-resolution printing tasks because they can be customized to suit a particular need. Bitmap fonts are also some-
times used by graphical operating systems for screen displays because scalable fonts do not look good at the low