Understanding Fonts; Typefaces And Fonts; Weight And Style; Pitch And Point Size - Dell 5100cn Color Laser Printer User Manual

Understanding Fonts

Typefaces and fonts

Bitmapped and Scalable Fonts
Resident Fonts
Symbol Sets
Typefaces and fonts
A font is a set of characters and symbols created with a distinct design. The distinct design is called a typeface. The
typefaces you select add personality to a document. Well-chosen typefaces make a document easier to read.
The printer has numerous resident fonts in PCL 6 and PostScript 3. See

Weight and style

Typefaces are often available in different weights and styles. These variations modify the original typeface so you can, for
example, emphasize important words in text or highlight book titles. The different weights and styles are designed to
complement the original typeface.
Weight refers to the thickness of the lines that form the characters. Thicker lines result in darker characters. Some words
commonly used to describe the weight of a typeface are bold, medium, light, black, and heavy.
Style refers to other typeface modifications, such as tilt or character width. Italic and oblique are styles where the
characters are tilted. Narrow, condensed, and extended are three common styles that modify the character widths.
Some fonts combine several weight and style modifications; for example, Helvetica Narrow Bold Oblique. A group of
several weight and style variations of a single typeface is called a typeface family. Most typeface families have four
variations: regular, italic (oblique), bold, and bold italic (bold oblique). Some families have more variations, as the
following illustration for the Helvetica typeface family shows:

Pitch and Point Size

The size of a font is specified as either a pitch or point size, depending on whether the font is fixed space or proportional.
In fixed space fonts, each character has the same width. Pitch is used to specify the size of fixed space fonts. It is a
measure of the number of characters that will print in one horizontal inch of type. For example, all 10-pitch fonts print 10
characters per inch (cpi) and all 12-pitch fonts print 12 cpi:
"Resident Fonts" for a listing of all resident fonts.