U s i n g A s i a n ( D o u b l e - B y t e ) Tr u e Ty p e F o n t s

Previously, Monarch printers supported downloadable fonts, but with limited code pages. Characters are represented by character code pages. These fonts are designed to be regionally specific; therefore, all code pages may not be supported in a given font. For example, using Code Page 1252 (Latin 1), index 192 (represented as ~192 in an MPCL batch packet) prints this character, À. The 9850 printer previously supported single-byte character sets, which provided 255 different characters.

However, the 9850 printer now supports printing double-byte character sets, which provide over 65,000 characters. Double-byte character sets are typically used in Asian (Far East) countries. Code pages, such as 932 (Japanese Shift JIS) are available. Each code page contains several thousand characters. To access these characters in an MPCL batch packet, you need to pick a specific code page and a specific type of font encoding.

One standard font encoding is Unicode. Unicode is a double-byte (16-bit) encoding that includes many characters used throughout the world. Each Unicode index refers to a particular character, just like the index in a code page. Other double-byte font encodings exist for specific characters, such as BIG5 (Traditional Chinese), GB2312 (Simplified Chinese) and SJIS (Japanese Shift-JIS).

D o u b l e - B y t e B i t m a p F o n t s

Double-byte bitmap fonts, like single-byte bitmap fonts, are smaller and may image faster than TrueType fonts. When you create a double-byte bitmap font, you must specify a particular point size and code page. The batch data character mapping must match the code page of the font. For example, a BIG5 bitmap font must use BIG5 batch data.

B-22 Fonts

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Monarch 9825, 9850, 9403 I n g a s i a n D o u b l e B y t e Tr u e Ty p e F o n t s, U b l e B y t e B i t m a p F o n t s