Print Operations
Fonts and Your Printer
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P1062653-002 Rev. A ZD500 Series™ Thermal Transfer Printer User’s Guide 1/16/2014
Fonts and Your Printer
The ZD500 Series™ printer supports your language and font requirements with a variety of
internal fonts, on-board font scaling, international font sets and character code page support,
Unicode support, and font download.
The printer’s font capabilities are programming language dependent. The ZPL™
programming language provides advanced font mapping and scaling technology to support
outline fonts (TrueType™ or OpenType™) and Unicode character mapping as well as basic
bitmapped fonts and character code pages. ZPL programming guide describes and documents
the fonts, code pages, character access, listing fonts, and limitations for their respective printer
programming languages. See the printer programming guides for information on Text, Fonts
and Character support.
The printer includes utilities and application software that support font download into the
printer for both printer programming languages.

Identifying Fonts in Your Printer

Fonts and memory are shared by the programming languages in the printer. Fonts can be
loaded in many memory areas in the printer. ZPL programming can recognize EPL and ZPL
fonts. EPL programming can only recognize EPL fonts. See the respective programmer guides
for more information on fonts and printer memory.
ZPL Fonts:
• To manage and download fonts for ZPL print operation, use the Zebra Setup utility or
ZebraNet™ Bridge.
• To display all of the fonts loaded in your printer, send the printer the ZPL command ^WD.
See the ZPL Programmers Guide for details.
• Bitmap fonts in the various printer memory areas are identified by the .FNT file
extension in ZPL.
• Scalable fonts are identified with the .TTF, .TTE or .OTF file extensions in ZPL.
EPL does not support these fonts.

Localizing the Printer with Code Pages

The ZD500 Series™ printer supports two sets of language, region and character sets for
permanent fonts loaded into the printer for each printer programming language, ZPL and EPL.
The printer supports localization with common international character map code pages.
• For ZPL code page support, including Unicode, see the ^CI command in the ZPL
programmer’s guide.