Font Manager

Introduction

The Font Manager is a collection of routines and data structures that you can use to manage the fonts your application uses to display and print text. The Font Manager takes care of reading font data from font resources and creating the bitmap images that QuickDraw uses to display text.

QuickDraw draws text to the screen and, sometimes, to a printer. For its purposes, the glyphs that make up text are simply little images that make up a large, albeit well-ordered, image. QuickDraw uses size information, such as height and width, as it might use that information when arranging any graphic image. The Font Manager, by contrast, keeps track of detailed font information such as the glyphs’ character codes, whether fonts are fixed-width or proportional, and which fonts are related to each other by name. When QuickDraw needs to draw some text in a particular font, it sends a request for that font to the Font Manager. The Font Manager finds the font or the closest match to it that is available, and sends the font back to QuickDraw with some information that QuickDraw uses for stylistic variations and layout.