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Understanding Fonts

  Typefaces and Fonts

  Bitmapped and Scalable Fonts

  Resident Fonts

  Symbol Sets

Typefaces and Fonts

A font is a set of characters and symbols created with a distinct design. The distinct design is called a typeface. The typefaces you select add personality to a document. Well-chosen typefaces make a document easier to read.

The printer has numerous resident fonts in PCL 5/PCL 6. See "Resident Fonts" for a listing of all resident fonts.

Weight and Style

Typefaces are often available in different weights and styles. These variations modify the original typeface so you can, for example, emphasize important words in text or highlight book titles. The different weights and styles are designed to complement the original typeface.

Weight refers to the thickness of the lines that form the characters. Thicker lines result in darker characters. Some words commonly used to describe the weight of a typeface are bold, medium, light, black, and heavy.

Style refers to other typeface modifications, such as tilt or character width. Italic and oblique are styles where the characters are tilted. Narrow, condensed, and extended are three common styles that modify the character widths.

Some fonts combine several weight and style modifications; for example, Helvetica BdOb. A group of several weight and style variations of a single typeface is called a typeface family. Most typeface families have four variations: regular, italic (oblique), bold, and bold italic (bold oblique). Some families have more variations, as the following illustration for the Helvetica typeface family shows:

Pitch and Point Size

The size of a font is specified as either a pitch or point size, depending on whether the font is fixed space or proportional.

In fixed space fonts, each character has the same width. Pitch is used to specify the size of fixed space fonts. It is a measure of the number of characters that will print in one horizontal inch of type. For example, all 10-pitch fonts print 10 characters per inch (cpi) and all 12-pitch fonts print 12 cpi:

In proportional (or typographic) fonts, every character can have a different width. Since proportional fonts have characters with different widths, the font size is specified in point size, not pitch. Point size refers to the height of the characters in the font. A point is defined as 1/72 inch. The characters in a font printed at 24 point will be twice as large as the characters in the same font printed at 12 point.

The following illustration shows samples of a font printed in different point sizes:

The point size of a font is defined as the distance from the top of the tallest character in the font to the bottom of the lowest character in the font. Due to the definition of point size, different fonts printed at the same point size may appear quite different in size. This is because there are other font parameters that affect how the font looks. However, the point size of a font is an excellent specification of the relative size of a font. The following examples illustrate two very different proportional fonts at 14 point:

Bitmapped and Scalable Fonts

The printer uses both bitmapped and scalable fonts.

Bitmapped fonts are stored in print memory as predefined patterns of bits that represent a typeface at a specific size, style, and resolution. The following illustration shows an example of a character from a bitmapped font.

Bitmapped fonts are available in different type styles and point sizes as downloadable fonts.

Scalable fonts (also called outline fonts) are stored as computer programs that define the outlines of the characters in the font. Each time you print characters from a scalable font, the printer creates a bitmap of the characters at the point size you choose and saves it temporarily in print memory.

These temporary bitmapped fonts are deleted when you turn off or reset the printer. Scalable fonts provide the flexibility of printing in many different point sizes.

Your printer uses different scalable font formats for downloading fonts to the printer. PCL 5/PCL 6 uses Intellifont and TrueType scalable fonts. There are thousands of different scalable fonts available in these different font formats from numerous font suppliers.

If you plan to use many downloadable bitmapped or scalable fonts or if you plan to use many different sizes of scalable fonts, you may need to purchase additional memory for your printer.

Resident Fonts

Your printer is equipped with resident fonts stored permanently in print memory. Different fonts are available in PCL 5/PCL 6. Some of the most popular typefaces, like Courier and TimesNew, are available for all printer languages.

The following table lists all the fonts resident in your printer. See "Printing a Font Sample List" for instructions on how to print samples of the fonts. You can select the resident fonts from your software program or from the operator panel.

Symbol Sets

A symbol set is the collection of alphabetic and numeric characters, punctuation, and special characters available in the font you select. Symbol sets support the requirements for different languages or specific applications, such as math symbols used for scientific text.

In PCL 5/PCL 6, a symbol set also defines which character will print for each key on the keyboard (or more specifically, for each code point). Some applications require different characters at some code points. To support multiple applications and languages, your printer has 36 symbol sets for the resident PCL 5/PCL 6 fonts.

Symbol Sets for PCL 5/PCL 6

Not all font names support all of the symbol sets listed.

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