Filter
Top Products
HOW THE STAR
LASERPRINTER 8 STORES FONTS
Bit-mapped fonts
Star Micronics has earned a reputation for attractive, well-designed fonts on
its printers, and this laser printer continues the tradition.
The Star LaserPrinter 8 uses bit-mapped fonts. Each character is made up
of a pattern or “map” of dots, just like characters on a dot-matrix printer or
on your computer screen. Resolution makes the difference: to make each
character the Star LaserPrinter 8
uses ten or twenty times as many dots as
a dot-matrix printer or computer screen does.
Every size of print you want, plus every italic or boldface version, has its own
bit map and is normally considered a separate font. It takes a good deal of
printer memory to hold all the fonts you might want at any given moment.
Star LaserPrinter 8 fonts can be grouped into three categories: internal,
cartridge, and downloadable fonts.
In ternal fonts
The Star LaserPrinter 8 has four built-in internal fonts that reside perma-
nently in its read-only memory (ROM). That’s why these are sometimes
called “resident fonts”:
Courier Prestige Elite
Tms Romn Line Printer
Courier is the face used on the most common electric typewriters. Neither
Courier nor Prestige Elite, another typewriter face, are printed with propor-
tional spacing. Tms Romn however, is always spaced proportionally. Tms
Romn is probably the most readable and most popular commercial typeset-
ting face. The Line Printer font, designed originally for mainframe comput-
ers, is small and designed to pack a lot of characters into every inch of print
(great for spreadsheets).
With these most frequently used fonts in ROM, a page can be assembled
much faster than if the fonts had to be loaded into the printer for each printing
job.
38
-.
.-