Océ imagePRESS C7010VPS series, Technical Manual

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Introduction to fonts
In this section background information is given on fonts and the IBM AFP font structure.
What is a font?
A font is a set of printable or displayable text characters sharing the same type family, typeface,
and type size.
Consider the following example:
‘Helvetica 10-point roman medium normal Latin1’, where:
Helvetica Type family A group of typeface that share design charac‐
teristics and include many size and style varia‐
tions. For example: Courier, Times.
10-point Font size The size of the characters in points.
Typeface A collection of characters having the same
style, weight, and width.
roman Style The inclination of a letter around a vertical ax-
is. For example, roman (upright), italic (slan-
ted).
medium Weight The degree of boldness. For example: medi-
um, bold.
normal Width The horizontal variation in the character de-
sign. For example: normal, condensed.
Latin 1 Complement A collection of characters for Expanded Core
Fonts. For example: Latin 235, Cyrillic Greek.
In practise, the concepts of font and type family are often used without much precision,
sometimes interchangeably.
Fonts can be divided in the following main representation groups:
•
Bitmap fonts
A bitmap font is a digital representation of a font that is already fixed in size or a limited set of
sizes.
•
Outline fonts
An outline font is a software typeface that can generate a scalable range of font sizes.
IBM AFP Font Structure
A font in the IBM AFP environment has three components:
• Coded font
• Character set
• Code page
Introduction to fonts
Chapter 14 - SRA IPDS 347
imagePRESS C7010VPS series v2.2