Homelite HL-1660E Criteria for font selection, Symbol set, Symbol collections, Pitch, Height

10/10/03

5.1.15. Criteria for font selection

The printer will try to match your stated font requirements as best it can with the fonts available to it in any of the three possible font locations. In most cases you will be specifying a font you know to be present in one of the locations and the resulting printed text will appear exactly as you envisaged. However, if you specify a particular combination of font characteristics that is not possible, the printer will produce the closest possible match that it can by satisfying the following specifications in the following order: symbol set / spacing type / pitch (for monospaced fonts) / height / stroke weight / style.

The meanings of each of these are explained in the following sub-sections. Likewise, if you simply specify a font attribute that is not available, for example if you request a Utah Light font when only Utah Medium and Utah Bold are available in the font locations, the printer will simply ignore the requirement (light stroke weight, in this case) that it cannot fulfill.

5.1.16. Symbol set

The symbol set is the list of symbols that constitute a particular font. Normally, symbol sets contain lower and upper case letters, numbers, punctuation marks and a selection of other commonly used symbols. Some symbol sets are designed for specific needs, for example, for generating text with mathematical expressions. The symbol set has the highest priority of all the characteristics you specify when you designate the font you require. If the symbol set you choose is available, but not in conjunction with any of the other characteristics you specify, the printer will satisfy your symbol set request at the expense of the rest of your designation and the text printed out may well look completely different from what you expected to see.

5.1.17. Symbol collections

The symbol collections contain many symbols and a symbol set is made from symbol collections by selecting the required symbols for unbound fonts. As symbol collections have more symbols than symbol sets, unbound fonts can have more symbols than bound fonts. Due to the compatibility between symbol sets and symbol collections, the printer searches the designated MSL or Unicode number by using a symbol set mapping table.

5.1.18. Type of character spacing

Character spacing is either fixed (monospacing), in which every printed character is allocated the same amount of space on the line, or proportional, where characters are spaced according to their shape and size. For any serious typographic work proportional spacing is essential since fixed spacing is unattractive and hard to read. In general, monospacing is used with bitmap fonts and proportional spacing is used with scalable fonts. However, proportionally spaced bitmap fonts do exist.

5.1.19. Pitch

Pitch is the number of characters that are printed per inch and therefore only applies to monospaced fonts. If you make a pitch selection while using a proportionally spaced font the command will have no immediate effect. However, the new pitch will be stored as part of the primary (or secondary) font designation and applied the next time a monospaced font is selected as the primary (or secondary) font.

The printer’s in-built bitmap fonts all have a pitch of either 10, 12 or 16.66 characters per inch.

5.1.20. Height

Height refers to the height in points (1/72") of unaccented capital letters in a font. This is the generally accepted method of defining the height of a font’s characters. Scaled fonts can be specified to an accuracy of 0.25 points.

5.1.21. Style

A font’s style is defined by its posture (upright or italic), width (condensed, normal or expanded) and structure (solid, outline or shadow). Upright and italic bitmap fonts and scalable typefaces are available in the printer’s ROM. However, these are all normal and solid fonts. To print using any of the other styles (for example, using Condensed Helsinki or Outline Tennessee) you would have to download the requisite font or install a font card/cartridge containing it.

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