Oki 12i/n, 10ex manual What Is a Font?, Printing a Font List, Using Fonts, Symbol Sets

Fonts

What Is a Font?

Strictly speaking, a font refers to a set of printable characters in a particular typeface of a specific size (e.g. 12 point) and style (e.g. roman, bold or bold-italic). In computer printing, however, this term has been used in a wider context to refer to all sizes and styles of a particular typeface. In printers, fonts may be divided into two basic types: bitmap fonts and scalable (or outline) fonts.

Bitmap fonts are made up of a pattern of dots (at the printer resolution) to form the image of each printable character. These are of a fixed size, and scaling makes them look ragged.

Scalable fonts are stored as a set of mathematical curves. At print time the printer uses the stored curves to make up a bitmap of each character required, at the required size, and in the required style, at the full printer resolution. Such fonts are therefore said to be scalable, and do not appear ragged at enlarged sizes.

Printing a Font List

1.Press the ON-LINEbutton to take the printer off line.

2.Press the TRAY TYPE/Print Fonts button for at least two seconds. The display shows FONTS HP PCL6.

3.Press the ENTER button.

4.After a short delay two pages of font information will be printed, including samples.

Using Fonts

Some MS-DOS and most Windows programs provide an easy method of font selection within documents. In these cases the printer’s font selection is controlled by the host PC software application (or by Windows itself). On other software platforms special codes (escape sequences) must be embedded with the print data. This topic is beyond the scope of this Help Guide. However, the font list referred to in the previous topic contains a list of the required codes. Use of these codes is best left to a professional programmer.

Symbol Sets

Your printer provides special sets of characters for technical, legal and foreign language uses, as well as sets of drawing characters and standard alphanumeric characters. Each font uses symbols from one or more of these sets.

English

User’s Guide 21