Specifications

resolution of the typical monitor; Windows 9x, for example, uses the MS Sans Serif bitmap font in various sizes for its
menus and onscreen icon displays. However, a technology called antialiasing, which uses pixels of varying shades of
gray (instead of just black and white) to smooth out jagged lines, has largely replaced the use of bitmap fonts on screen
displays for text entry. Popularized by Adobe Type Manager (with Type 1 fonts), antialiasing has become more wide-
spread for Windows users thanks to the font smoothing features in the Microsoft Plus! add-on for Windows 95 and the
built-in font smoothing in Windows 98 and Me.
Because antialiasing occasionally can cause problems due to incompatibilities with a few display drivers, it can be turned
off.
As a result of this evolution in technology, the terms font and typeface have come to be confused. In
the old days, when you purchased a typeface, you would receive the same character set in a variety of
sizes, with each size being called a font. Today, when you purchase a typeface, you receive only a sin-
gle outline font that your printer can scale to any size; depending on the vendor, you typically get the
font in several typestyles, such as Roman, Bold, Italic, and Bold Italic.
Before TrueType scalable fonts were common, bitmap fonts were commonly used on laser printers.
Many LaserJet and compatible printers, such as the HP LaserJet II and LaserJet III, were designed to
handle removable font cartridges. Virtually all laser printers also could use bitmap fonts on a disk that
needed to be downloaded to the laser printer’s memory.
Today, scalable type is all but universal, and although printers usually are equipped with a selection of
font outlines permanently stored in memory, this is more for reasons of speed and convenience than
necessity. The printer driver on your PC can automatically download font outlines to the printer as
needed or generate scalable type just as your printer can. Technologies such as the TrueType fonts
found on both Windows and Macintosh systems can provide you with access to hundreds of type-
faces in many styles and at almost any size. Another benefit of scalable type is that a TrueType font
can be used on any printer that supports graphics, not just laser printers. Thus, laser, LED page, and
inkjet printers can print a document using the same TrueType fonts and produce pages that look very
similar.
See “Driver Problems”
Although all outline fonts function in basically the same way, various types of scalable fonts are avail-
able. PostScript was the original scalable font technology, and Adobe has built up a library of type-
faces over the years that is without peer in the digital type industry. Most PostScript printers are
equipped with a collection of 39 or more basic fonts stored internally, but you can choose from thou-
sands of others by browsing Adobe’s online services or its Type On Call CD-ROM. In either case, after
you purchase these PostScript Type 1 font outlines, you install them on your computer along with a
utility called Adobe Type Manager, which is responsible for downloading the appropriate font outlines
to your printer as necessary. PostScript Type 3 font outlines were once widely used, but they produce
poor results and should be avoided. Type 3 outlines lack the “hinting” necessary to getting top-
quality results from a single font outline at any size. This “hinting” feature is used by Type 1 and
TrueType fonts.
Note
Adobe Type Manager also can be used with non-PostScript printers, allowing laser and inkjet printers to access the wide
world of Type 1 fonts.
The other major scalable font technology in use today is TrueType. Developed about six years after
PostScript, TrueType is the result of a joint project between Apple and Microsoft. Both companies