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User’s Guide 21
English
Fonts
What Is a Font?
Strictly speaking, a font refers to a set of printable characters
in a particular typeface of a specific size (e.g. 12 point) and
style (e.g. roman, bold or bold-italic). In computer printing,
however, this term has been used in a wider context to refer
to all sizes and styles of a particular typeface. In printers,
fonts may be divided into two basic types: bitmap fonts and
scalable (or outline) fonts.
Bitmap fonts are made up of a pattern of dots (at the printer
resolution) to form the image of each printable character. These
are of a fixed size, and scaling makes them look ragged.
Scalable fonts are stored as a set of mathematical curves. At
print time the printer uses the stored curves to make up a
bitmap of each character required, at the required size, and
in the required style, at the full printer resolution. Such fonts
are therefore said to be scalable, and do not appear ragged at
enlarged sizes.
Printing a Font List
1. Press the ON-LINE button to take the printer off line.
2. Press the TRAY TYPE/Print Fonts button for at least two
seconds. The display shows
FONTS HP PCL6
.
3. Press the ENTER button.
4. After a short delay two pages of font information will be
printed, including samples.
Using Fonts
Some MS-DOS and most Windows programs provide an easy
method of font selection within documents. In these cases the
printer’s font selection is controlled by the host PC software
application (or by Windows itself). On other software platforms
special codes (escape sequences) must be embedded with the
print data. This topic is beyond the scope of this Help Guide.
However, the font list referred to in the previous topic contains
a list of the required codes. Use of these codes is best left to a
professional programmer.
Symbol Sets
Your printer provides special sets of characters for technical,
legal and foreign language uses, as well as sets of drawing
characters and standard alphanumeric characters. Each font
uses symbols from one or more of these sets.
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