Epson 100-88002 manual Fonts, Character Generation, Outline characters

Unicode and Fonts

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.

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