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Font Types
4.6.3 Type1 Fonts
later versions provide True Type Big Fonts. These fonts contain all the characters
necessary to display or print multilingual text. If you try to type, display, or print
multilingual text and see unexpected characters, then you are probably not using a Big
Font. Big Fonts provided by Microsoft under Windows NT release 4.0 and later, are as
follows:
■ Arial
4.6.4 TrueType Fonts
■ Courier New
■ Lucida Console
■ Lucida Sans Unicode
■ Times New Roman
Third-party Unicode fonts are also available.
To enable Unicode support, set the NLS_LANG environment variable as follows:
NLS_LANG=character_set.UTF8
PostScript font formats Adobe Type 1 fonts are stored in two common formats: .pfa
(PostScript Font ASCII) and .pfb (PostScript Font Binary). These contain descriptions
of the character shapes, with each character being generated by a small program that
calls on other small programs to compute common parts of the characters in the font.
In both cases, the character descriptions are encrypted. Before such a font can be used,
it must be rendered into dots in a bitmap, either by the PostScript interpreter, or by a
specialized rendering engine, such as Adobe Type Manager, which is used to generate
low-resolution screen fonts on Apple Macintosh and on Microsoft Windows systems.
The Type 1 binary files(.pfa, .pfb) contain character information while the metric (.afm
- Adobe Font Metric or .pfm - Printer Font Metric) files contain the metric information
to form the character. These metrics files are ASCII files with a well-defined
easy-to-parse structure.
The personal computer brought about a need for scalable font technology, thought to
be an important part of any future operating system. TrueType is this scalable font
technology that enables you to view the same output without the jagged aliasing
caused by scaling that is apparent when bitmapped fonts are used.
This technology involves two parts:
■ The Rasterizer
■ TrueType fonts
The Rasterizer is an application that is included in both Windows and Macintosh
operating systems. It acts as an interpreter and translates the font information into a
form that the video display can render.
The TrueType fonts themselves contain information that describes the outline of each
character in the typeface. Higher quality fonts also contain hinting codes. Hinting is a
process that makes a font that has been scaled down to a small size look its best.
Instead of simply relying on the vector outline, the hinting codes ensure that the
characters line up well with the pixels so that the font looks as smooth and legible as
possible.
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