Printing, pre-press, publishing and photography services – yesterday, today and tomorrow

Contents:

1. FONTS
2. FONTS AND TYPEFACES
3. PRINTER DRIVERS
4. PRINTER FONTS
5. THE WINDOWS APPROACH
6. TRUETYPE FONTS
7. FINDING YOUR FONTS
8. ENTER POSTSCRIPT
9. TYPE 1 FONTS
10. FONTS AND THE WEB
11. OpenType and TrueDoc
12. FOR MORE INFORMATION

PRINTER (RESIDENT) FONTS
For a long time, most DOS programs were only able to print using fonts that were hard-coded (or "resident") in the printer itself: the driver for that printer allowed the program to use these resident fonts. There were few fonts to choose from, and they were usually only of one size (although most allowed the user to specify the pitch, or number of characters to print per inch). As dot matrix printers became more common, some DOS programs, like Lotus 1-2-3, began offering additional fonts that were not resident in the printer.

This was accomplished by using special font information, stored in files that were added during the program's installation, and sending text and fonts to the printer as graphics, rather than as characters. Though this new ability made printing much more flexible, it had several limitations. Chief among these was that dot matrix printers tend to print graphics much more slowly than plain text. Also, other companies' programs couldn't take advantage of these fonts, since they were proprietary and unique to Lotus.