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Overview
4-2
❖
4520/4520mp User’s Guide
A
font
is a collection of characters of one typeface, one
weight, and one posture. An example is Courier New Italic. A
font generally contains uppercase and lowercase alphabets,
numbers, and special characters such as punctuation marks.
A
font family
is composed of one typeface in all its available
weights and postures. Courier New, for example, has
medium, italic, bold, and bold italic.
Fonts are normally categorized according to the manner in
which they are generated:
•
Bitmapped
font
A bitmapped font contains digitized images of each
character in the font. Each symbol (that is, character,
number, or punctuation mark) is a
complete
image
in
digitized form.
Each symbol is stored as a bitmap (or raster) that
represents the black or white parts of the symbol. The
bitmaps are copied onto the paper when printing takes
place.
•
Scalable
font
A scalable font contains characters described by
mathematical formulae that produce
character outlines
.
A mathematical formula describes a line between two
points which constitutes one line of the character’s
outline. The images printed on paper are digitized as the
page is being printed. During digitization, the image may
be scaled, sloped, or rotated.
There exists a variety of mathematical models used to
construct scalable fonts, but the two most popular are
Bézier and B-spline.
Scalable fonts are also known as
contour
or
outline
fonts.
Overview
Bitmapped and
Scalable Fonts
WUG-CH04 Page 2 Black,Cyan Sunday, January 22, 1995 8:27 PM