Omron NB10W-TW01B, Operation Manual

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3 Functions of NB-Designer
3-70 NB-series Programmable Terminals NB-Designer Operation Manual(V106)
Type and Characteristics of Font
NB-Designer provides 3 available fonts, i.e. Bitmap Font, graphic font and vector font. The
characteristics of these three fonts will be described as follows:
Bitmap Font :
One bitmap font is prepared for each character. But this method has obvious disadvantages:
(a) Only SimSun is supported.
(b) The scaling effect is poor. For each character, 3 kinds of bitmaps (i.e. 8×8, 16×8, 24×16(height ×
width)) are reserved respectively, so the effect is very poor when the larger font is displayed, as
shown below:
(c) Single-byte character may be treated as double-byte character. ASCII code is treated as a single-
byte character, but the other character are converted to double-byte character in the software.
Therefore, a character varies in its width for each character (such as Russian) cannot be displayed
correctly.
Therefore, this method has the obvious disadvantages for the project with multiple languages.
Graphic Font:
Graphic font is converted to one bitmap and stored in the project. This method can make full use of the
fonts installed in Windows and the display effect is good.
(a) The capacity of the project becomes greater. There are 2 reasons for the large space needed for
saving the character string as bitmap. First, bitmap format itself needs a large space. For example:
Four characters “
” displayed in Zero SimSun needs 1824 bytes, as shown below:
In addition, the bitmap font should be intercepted again if the content, size or colors vary slightly,
thus causing a linear increase in the occupied space.
When a character is converted as a bitmap, it is converted as the unit of character string, not the
unit of the character. Even if a similar character is different with its content, font size, color, the
character is converted as an individual bitmap. As the converted bitmaps are stored in the NB
project file for each character string with different properties as above, the capacity occupied with
the fonts should be increased in the project.
(b) Text library or some component labels do not support the graphic font.
Vector Font:
The characters used for labels or supposed to be used in future are abstracted through specified fonts
by NB-Designer. Only the abstracted characters are stored as True Type font (ttf style) and can be used
by the NB-Designer units.
Using vector font in NB-Designer can avoid the disadvantages of Bitmap Font and graphic font.
Vector font has the following advantages:
3-5-9 Fonts