Unicode and Fonts
100-88002 Rev B Page 193
Fonts Your TransAct® Epic 880TM printer uses outline and/or stroke based scalable fonts.
These fonts provide you wish additional font options as well as improved character
appearance, while functioning transparently within legacy applications.
Such fonts represent a substantial improvement to the so-called bitmap fonts that are
traditionally used for thermal printers, which are based on a pixel by pixel definition of
characters. With a fixed size and fixed character spacing, these bitmap fonts were
limited to specific magnification factors from 2-8X, and required scaling and
smoothing at larger font sizes. Moreover, such scaling and smoothing operations
were often unsuitable for complex fonts such as Asian characters, where changes to
pixel layout actually risk changing character meanings.
To take full advantage of scalable fonts, the Epic 880TM supports additional
commands and features, including:
1) Character size selection by points
2) Character pitch selection by points
3) Variable character spacing if desired
4) Custom fonts
5) Unicode support for international language support
6) Enhanced code page support for ASCII based applications.
Character Generation
The font technology in the Epic 880TM printer uses standard outline fonts (sometimes
referred to as TrueType fonts) or stroke fonts. Both technologies are scalable,
however each has unique advantages.
Outline characters
Outline characters use points along the edge of the character to describe the
character. The character generator defines the edge and then fills in the
enclosed space to define the character.
This type of character generation produces very well formed characters and
produces the best looking characters. However, it requires more storage than
stroke fonts, and is best for non-Asian fonts.