Vector Fonts - Omron NB Series Operation Manual

3 Functions of NB-Designer
3-5-9

Vector Fonts

Type and Characteristics of Font
NB-Designer provides 3 available fonts, i.e. dot matrix font, graphics font and vector font. The
characteristics of these three fonts will be described as follows:
Dot Matrix Font:
Dot Matrix font saves the bitmap for each character of the required Chinese character set. Each
primitive (small picture) is spliced together to form a character string when it is used. But this method
has obvious disadvantages:
(a) Only SimSun is supported.
(b) The scaling effect is poor. For each character, 3 kinds of bitmaps (i.e. 8×8, 16×8, 24×16(height ×
width)) are reserved respectively, so the effect is very poor when the larger font is displayed, as
shown below:
(c) The handlings of half-width characters and full-width characters are not perfect. In the software,
ASCII codes are treated as half-width characters, and the other characters are intercepted as the
fixed width. Due to some characters can't be displayed as the width-equal characters, the display
effects for some languages are poor, especially for Russian, as shown below.
Therefore, this method has the obvious disadvantages for the project with multiple languages.
Graphics Font:
Graphics font treats the whole character string as a whole, and intercepts the whole bitmap and saves it
in the project. This method can make full use of the fonts installed in Windows and the display effect is
good.
(a) A large space is occupied. There are 2 reasons for the large space needed for saving the character
string as bitmap. First, bitmap format itself needs a large space. For example: Four characters
"
In addition, the bitmap font should be intercepted again if the content, size or colors vary slightly,
thus causing a linear increase in the occupied space.
(b) Text library and some component tags can't use the graphics font.
Vector Font:
In NB-Designer, the software intercepts the characters that are needed for or may be used by the user
from the user-set fonts through checking the setup of the user-set fonts, and then makes them into very
small TrueType font file (in ttf format) for the slave unit to use.
Using vector font in NB-Designer can avoid the disadvantages of dot matrix font and graphics font.
Vector font has the following advantages:
(a) It supports a large variety of vector fonts. The TrueType font (only the font in ttf format) installed in
the operating system can be used.
3-70
" displayed in Zero SimSun needs 1824 bytes, as shown below:
NB-series Programmable Terminals NB-Designer Operation Manual(V106)