This article is about font technology. For information about the typographic appearance of individual font sets, see
Typefaces. A computer font is an electronic
data file containing a set of
glyphs, characters, or symbols such as
dingbats. Although the term "font" once referred to interchangeable
typefaces using mechanical components such as a typeball element or a
daisy wheel, most modern fonts are used in computing. There are three basic kinds of computer font file data formats: Bitmap fonts consist of a series of dots or
pixels representing the image of each glyph in each face and size. Outline fonts use
Bézier curves, drawing instructions and mathematical formulas to describe each glyph, which make the character outlines scalable to any size. Stroke fonts use a series of specified lines and additional information to define the profile, or size and shape of the line in a specific face and size, which together describe the appearance of the glyph.
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<
text> (Or "vector font") A
font defined as a set of lines and curves as opposed to a
bitmap font. An outline font (e.g.
PostScript,
TrueType,
RISC OS) can be scaled to any size and otherwise transformed more easily than a bitmap font, and with more attractive results, though this requires a lot of numerical processing. The result of transforming a character in an outline font in a particular way is often saved as a bitmap in a
font cache to avoid repeating the calculations if that character is to be drawn again.
(1995-03-16)
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