Chapter 32. How Black-and-White Printing Works

How Black-and-White Printing Works

ALL computer printing these days is based on the dot matrix. Whether it’s a laser printer going through an intricate ballet of movement and time or an ink-jet printer spitting dots of color on paper, the printer is limited to producing dots. Thousands of dots on a single page, but still dots.

Regardless of how the dots are created, there must be a common method for determining where to place the dots. The most common schemes are bitmaps and outline fonts. Bitmapped fonts come in predefined sizes and weights. Outline fonts can, on the fly, be scaled and given special attributes, such as boldfacing and ...

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