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Using Fonts With the Color StyleWriter 6500
The icon of a bitmapped font (also called a fixed-size font or screen font) has
the single letter A on it. The font’s point size appears at the end of its name.
When you request a bitmapped character, your computer looks for an installed
bitmapped font in the size you specified. (See “How the Computer Looks for
Fonts” later in this appendix.) If it can’t find that font, your computer tries to
construct one by scaling a size that it does find.
In most cases, scaled bitmapped fonts don’t look nearly as good as preinstalled
ones. Such scaling is one reason for the jagged edges (sometimes called
“jaggies”) you’ll see on your screen or in a printed document when you
request an uninstalled size (for example, 17-point Geneva).
Bitmapped fonts are designed on grids of 72 dots per inch (dpi)—the standard
Mac OS–based computer screen resolution. Because of their correspondence
to the standard screen resolution, bitmapped fonts in preinstalled sizes always
look great on your display.
When you print a bitmapped font, it prints at a resolution of 72 dpi. Because
most modern printers can print at resolutions far better than this (your
Color StyleWriter 6500 prints at 300 dpi or better), printed bitmapped fonts
almost always have jagged edges or stairstep sides.
Fortunately, the computer can use bitmapped fonts in combination with
other font formats, reserving bitmaps for the screen and other kinds of fonts
for the printer.
PostScript fonts
PostScript is a page-description language that defines the characters, symbols,
and images that appear on each page of a document. A PostScript font comes
as a pair of fonts: an outline font for the printer and a corresponding
bitmapped font for displaying type on your screen.
No bitmapped font, no menu entry: If your system doesn’t have the bitmapped
font, the PostScript font name won’t appear in your font menu.