rick@trlamct.trl.oz.au (Rick Coxhill) (09/14/90)
Can someone please provide a short tutorial about fonts and mswindows 3.0? The manual does not have enough information about types of fonts, how printer and screen fonts are related and other stuff. For example, I have a HP Deskjet+ Printer. By default, windows 3.0 provides a number of fonts for the printer including Helvetica and Roman and Script. If you use these fonts in Write, they will print on the printer, even though these fonts are not resident in the printer. Questions: 1. What is unique about these fonts that allows them to be used as screen and printer fonts? Are they linked with the printer driver somehow? 2. If one obtains public domain mswindow fonts, how do you know if they are only screen, or both screen and printer fonts? 3. How do you install public domain fonts? I followed the manual instructions, was able to view all the fonts and different sizes in the control panel window, but could not get Write to use them. 4. Fonts listed in the control panel have information such as [All], [VGA res] etc after the name. Does [All] mean its a vector font? What does [VGA res] mean? Are there other types? UUCP: ...!uunet!munnari!trlamct.trl.oz!rick Tel: 61 3 541 6249 ARPA: rick%trlamct.trl.oz@uunet.uu.net Fax: 61 3 541 8863 Rick Coxhill. Telecom Australia Research Labs. Clayton. Vic. Aust.
CC65SRAD@MIAMIU.BITNET (09/19/90)
Fonts can be in two formats: bitmapped and outline. Bitmapped fonts are only good for one point size, and a new copy must be generated for each point. This is why you don't see more than three or four point sizes available for a Windows font. The fonts that come with Windows are bitmapped. Understand that the resolution of your printer and your screen are different. This matters to a bitmapped font. To a bitmap, if your screen has a resolution of 60 dots per inch, a character 60 dots high would be one inch high. If you have a laser printer, and print at 300 dots per inch, a character 60 dots high would only meaasure 3/8 of an inch. Understanding that this is a very lay definition (I am not an expert, by any means), this is the reason there are different fonts for the screen and the printer. Basically, any font you get for Windows will serve both the screen and the printer. If your printer alread y has fonts in it , a PostScript printer for example, you cannot display these fonts on the screen, because they reside only in your printer. To allow WYSIWYG, some companies provide Windows screen fonts to match the fonts already in the printer. These fonts will not print, as they were designed for the screen. The printer company invested a lot of money in the fonts installed in their printer, and it would be counterproductive to give them away. If you want more fonts, you must contact a company like Bitstream or Adobe. The can set you up with many fonts, and control programs to use them. These companies also use outline fonts, which are fonts that can be resized to any point size without needing a seperate font for each. They are slower, but more space efficient than bitmaps. If you attempt to use a screen font in a Windows app, it will display, but when it prints, it will use a printer font closest to the screen font, usually with undesirable resaults. The (VGA Res) and (All) simply mean that the bitmaps are optimized to a certain resolution (VGA,EGA,CGA,Herc) or are stroke fonts that can be used with any resolution (all) +-------------------------------------------------------------+ | Christopher Cherry CC65SRAD @ MIAMIU.BITNET | | Charm is a way of getting the answer yes without having | | asked a clear question. -Albert Cammus,'The Fall' | +-------------------------------------------------------------+