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User’s Guide 23
Fonts
What is a font?
A font refers to a set of printable characters in a partic-
ular 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: bit-
map 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 in the required style, at the full printer res-
olution. 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 TRAY TYPE/Print Fonts button for at least
two seconds. The LCD 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
Most Windows programs provide an easy method of
font selection within documents. In these cases the font
selection is controlled by the host PC software applica-
tion (or by Windows itself). On other software plat-
forms special codes (escape sequences) must be
embedded with the print data. This topic is beyond the
scope of this user guide. However, the font list referred
to above contains a list of the required codes. Use of
these codes is best left to a professional programmer.
Symbol sets
The printer provides special sets of characters for tech-
nical, legal and foreign language uses, as well as sets of
drawing and standard alphanumeric characters. Each
font uses symbols from one or more of these sets.