Xerox 4520 User Manual

Contents

O v e r v i e w4-2v 4 5 2 0 / 4 5 2 0 m p U s e r ’ s G u i d eA font is a collection of characters of one typeface, oneweight, and one posture. An example is Courier New Italic. Afont 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 availableweights and postures. Courier New, for example, hasmedium, italic, bold, and bold italic.Fonts are normally categorized according to the manner inwhich they are generated:• Bitmapped fontA bitmapped font contains digitized images of eachcharacter in the font. Each symbol (that is, character,number, or punctuation mark) is a complete image indigitized form.Each symbol is stored as a bitmap (or raster) thatrepresents the black or white parts of the symbol. Thebitmaps are copied onto the paper when printing takesplace.• Scalable fontA scalable font contains characters described bymathematical formulae that produce character outlines.A mathematical formula describes a line between twopoints which constitutes one line of the character’soutline. The images printed on paper are digitized as thepage is being printed. During digitization, the image maybe scaled, sloped, or rotated.There exists a variety of mathematical models used toconstruct scalable fonts, but the two most popular areBézier and B-spline.Scalable fonts are also known as contour or outline fonts.OverviewBitmapped andScalable FontsWUG-CH04 Page 2 Black,Cyan Sunday, January 22, 1995 8:27 PM