Xerox 4510/4510ps, 4505/4505ps manual Bitmapped font, Scalable font

Overview

Bitmapped and Scalable Fonts

O v e r v i e w

A font is a collection of characters of one typeface, one weight, and one posture. An example is Courier New Italic. A font generally contains uppercase and lowercase alphabets, numbers, and special characters such as punctuation marks.

A font family is composed of one typeface in all its available weights and postures. Courier New, for example, has medium, italic, bold, and bold italic.

Fonts are normally categorized according to the manner in which they are generated:

•Bitmapped font

A bitmapped font contains digitized images of each character in the font. Each symbol (that is, character, number, or punctuation mark) is a complete image in digitized form.

Each symbol is stored as a bitmap (or raster) that represents the black or white parts of the symbol. The bitmaps are copied onto the paper when printing takes place.

•Scalable font

A scalable font contains characters described by mathematical formulae that produce character outlines. A mathematical formula describes a line between two points which constitutes one line of the character’s outline. The images printed on paper are digitized as the page is being printed. During digitization, the image may be scaled, sloped, or rotated.

There exists a variety of mathematical models used to construct scalable fonts, but the two most popular are Bézier and B-spline.

Scalable fonts are also known as contour or outline fonts.

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