Skip to Main Content
Fonts & Encodings
book

Fonts & Encodings

by Yannis Haralambous
September 2007
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
1040 pages
31h 23m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Fonts & Encodings

Appendix A. Bitmap Font Formats

Without a doubt, bitmap font formats are things of the past. Aside from a few visionaries such as Luc Devroye [117], who dreams of the perfect rendition of a font in bitmap form with a pixel having the size of a molecule of ink (!), few people give serious consideration to bitmap fonts today, since all operating systems, without exception, have switched to vector fonts.

Yet bitmap fonts are practical for display on screen. First, they are rendered more cleanly: as much as we sing the praises of vector fonts, a good, sturdy bitmap font is more efficient than the most beautiful Aldine for displaying text on the screen as it is typed, especially at a small size. Moreover, bitmap fonts are easy to modify and adapt to changing needs. Creating a new glyph takes less than a minute; modifying it is a matter of a few clicks to enable or disable a handful of pixels.

Bitmap fonts can always be useful in any application oriented towards reading on a screen rather than towards printing, such as the Unix console that we use every day but hardly ever print out.

Next, there are also bitmap fonts that go with vector fonts. An intelligent operating system can take advantage of them to display certain actual sizes optimally while using vector fonts for printing.

Below we shall examine the most common bitmap font formats. Most of them are surprisingly simple, unlike those for vector fonts.

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Start your free trial

You might also like

Unicode Demystified

Unicode Demystified

Richard Gillam
Unicode Explained

Unicode Explained

Jukka K. Korpela
Blender 3D By Example - Second Edition

Blender 3D By Example - Second Edition

Oscar Baechler, Xury Greer

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780596102425Catalog PageErrata