This process occurs transparently to the application so that the font in the operating system can be used on the screen and on the printer. However, when a font definition is downloaded or when a glyph is drawn onto the printer through a bitmap, only some overhead or print job spool size is saved. Some argue that because the printer is drawing the character glyphs of the font, these fonts are device fonts. When the printer processes the print job, the font definition is installed in the printer memory so that the font definition can be inked onto the printed page of the document. When you print a document, the definition for the font is provided as part of the print job. The operating system provides downloadable fonts, which are also known as soft fonts. Fonts that the operating system provides but whose definition can be downloaded to the printer and used on the printer as if the printer hardware provided the fonts directly. In this case, the printer hardware can substitute for the operating system's fonts.ĭownloadable fonts.
Fonts that exist in the operating system and that the printer hardware also provides. For the purposes of this article, these are fonts that only the printer hardware provides and that you can use only on the printer.ĭevice font substitution. These device fonts provide a character glyph definition that can be addressed per character by the printer's page rasterizer hardware to ink the shape onto paper.ĭevice fonts can be categorized into three basic types: Device fontsįor the purposes of this article, device fonts are any fonts whose definition exists either permanently or transiently in the printer's memory. For example, this may occur because the font is unique and has no similar substitute in the operating system or perhaps because you want to avoid the overhead of downloading a font definition to the printer.
However, you may still want to use a font that only the printer provides. For most applications, it isn't an issue whether a character glyph is drawn as a whole form from a printer-resident definition or is drawn as a collection of pixels that the operating system provides. Today, most printers are fundamentally designed as raster devices and can draw a dot (a pixel) on any part of the paper as efficiently as all of a character glyph. Historically, this was necessary on impact-type printers (for example, dot-matrix printers) to obtain certain formatting or to speed up the printing. However, sometimes an application developer may have to select only a certain font specifically from a target printer. This is generally the correct result for the application, and this produces good printed results at reasonable speeds. Typically, when the application prints the document, the font (or a font that is similar to it) is used on the printer without any particular action from the application. Font must contain characters (otherwise known as glyphs).However, the application is typically not concerned with the particular font that is used, only it meets certain requirements and the user prefers the font. To do this, you can select an operating system-supplied font through the application programming interface (API) or through the common Choose Font dialog box.
How to make my printer print clearly software#
In most cases, a software developer relies on the operating system to provide the fonts that will be used for its drawing. Original product version: Win32 printer device Original KB number: 201978 Summary
The article also describes several problems that can happen when you try to use those printer fonts in application code.
How to make my printer print clearly how to#
This article describes how to determine which printer-resident device fonts are available for use in a Win32 printer device context. The fonts that are in printers can sometimes be useful and difficult to use in application program code.