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Font Names

When a font is designed, it is assigned a name such as Courier Oblique. This font belongs to a font family called Courier, which includes:

When the PostScript page description software language was developed by Adobe Systems, the spaces embedded in font names were replaced with dashes. PostScript font names look like this:

Courier
Courier-Bold
Courier-BoldOblique
HeiseiMin-W3--Adobe-Japan1-2
The size of a font is usually not part of the name of a scalable font because it can be scaled to any size. Bitmap fonts are usually designed in specific sizes. They are referred to by names such as 12-point Courier or 10-pixel Courier Bold.

The X Consortium specified 14-part font names for the X Window System. Each name is in effect a complete description of the font.

Figure 5-1 shows an example 14-part name for a bitmap font, with each part labeled. Point sizes in X font names are specified in decipoints (tenths of a point).

Figure 5-1 : X Window System Font Name Example

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