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1991-07-01
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─────────── The Soft Font Tutorial
Copyright 1991 by Elfring Soft Fonts
All rights reserved.
INTRODUCTION
Both laser printers and the DeskJet have become quite popular of late.
What's the reason for this surge in popularity? A laser printer is faster
and much quieter than a dot matrix printer, although they cost a great
deal more. So why buy one? The majority of these printers are purchased
because of the wide variety of fonts they support.
Unfortunately, it isn't until you've owned the printer for awhile that you
discover just how hard it can be to actually use those fonts. A fair num-
ber of people never do learn how to use different fonts with their
printers.
The major difficulty with fonts is finding a complete source of informa-
tion about them. To use fonts with your laser printer you need: some
background information on typography, definitions of laser printer ter-
minology, explanations of fonts and how they are named, and details of the
printer control language, PCL, used by the HP LaserJet and compatible
printers.
There are three different kinds of fonts available for HP LaserJet and
compatible printers, or the DeskJet. These are: internal fonts, cartridge
fonts, and soft fonts. Once you start printing with these fonts there are
no real differences between them. However, getting to the point where you
can actually print something with these fonts takes some doing. Note that
DeskJet soft fonts are not compatible with LaserJet fonts.
There are some disadvantages to soft fonts. They take up a considerable
amount of disk space. They also must be sent to your laser printer before
they can be used. Finally, soft fonts are volatile- when you turn off the
power to your laser printer they vanish. We feel, however, that the ad-
vantages listed previously greatly outweigh the disadvantages listed here.
Hence the need for this tutorial.
Hopefully, this tutorial will provide you with the information you need to
take control of your laser printer. Armed with this information you should
have no trouble selecting and using soft fonts in your printer.
One final note about the DeskJet printer. The DeskJet is a true line
printer, not a page printer. While it can handle soft fonts, it requires
an add on memory cartridge to do so. The DeskJet also has other limita-
tions, most of which are based on the fact that it is a line printer.
1
LASER PRINTING
Before going further into the details of soft fonts it's necessary to ex-
plain some of the basics of laser printing and its terminology. If you
are new to laser printing you need to have a thorough understanding of of
what a laser printer is and how it works before progressing on to soft
fonts. The first thing to do is to define a number of new terms as-
sociated with laser printers.
The type of printer that most people are familiar with is a typewriter.
With a typewriter, you strike a key and a character is printed. A dot
matrix printer is very similar in nature to a typewriter. You instruct it
to print a string of characters on one line and the dot matrix printer
prints each one sequentially. With both typewriters and dot matrix
printers vertical spacing is usually accomplished by sending a carriage
return to the printer.
A laser printer operates on a completely different manner. Laser printers
build and print an entire page at a time. An invisible cursor is used to
build this page. The cursor tells the laser printer where to put each
character on the page. This cursor can be moved automatically by software
in the laser printer, or it can be addressed with software on your PC.
To use a laser printer you must send an entire page of text, followed by a
command to print it. (If you send more text than will fit on a single
page, the laser printer will interpret that as a command to print the
first page.) The interesting thing to note here is that the text that is
sent to the printer does not have to appear in any specific order. You
can print at the bottom of the page, move to the top, and then go back to
the middle of the page. As long as you don't go past the bottom of the
page, or send a "print page" command (Control-L) the laser printer will
not appear to do anything. It will simply sit passively and receive your
text.
A dot matrix printer normally prints from left to right and from top to
bottom on a page. (The more advanced dot matrix printer prints bi-
directionally, but still must advance from the top to the bottom of a
page.) A laser printer has no restraints on what direction it prints. So,
it then becomes possible to print in several different ways, or orienta-
tions, on a sheet of paper. Thus a new set of terms are needed to define
the orientation of text on a page.
A page may be printed in either portrait or landscape modes. In portrait
mode the paper is positioned just as it would be in a typewriter. The 8.5
inch dimension of the paper runs horizontally and the 11 inch dimension of
the paper runs vertically. Text appears to run from left to right and
from top to bottom on the page.
In landscape mode the paper is positioned as you would place an envelope
in a typewriter. The 11 inch dimension of the paper runs horizontally and
the 8.5 inch dimension of the paper runs vertically. Text still appears
to run from left to right and from top to bottom on the page, but the page
has been rotated 90 degrees.
2
┌──────────┐ ┌──────────────────────────┐
│ │ │ │
│ │ │ landscape │
│ portrait │ │ │
│ │ │ │
│ │ │ mode │
│ │ │ │
│ mode │ └──────────────────────────┘
│ │
│ │
└──────────┘
Note that the DeskJet Plus and the DeskJet 500 printers can perform
limited landscape printing using fixed width cartridge of soft fonts. The
original DeskJet can only perform landscape printing with the addition of
a special cartridge. None of these printers can print proportionally
spaced fonts in landscape orientation.
LASERJET & DESKJET BASICS
There are ten different models of LaserJet printers, and three different
DeskJet printers. Each model has different font handling capabilities and
comes with a different set of fonts. There are actually three different
kinds of fonts for either the LaserJet or the DeskJet printer and we
should define these before going further. Note that DeskJet and LaserJet
fonts are not interchangeable.
INTERNAL FONTS are stored inside your laser printer in Read-Only-Memory.
Each LaserJet model has a different set of internal fonts. Most compatible
printers offer different sets of internal fonts.
CARTRIDGE FONTS are Read-Only-Memory fonts that can be added or removed
from a laser printer. They come in a small box, or cartridge, that can be
plugged into your printer. Functionally, there is no difference between
internal and cartridge fonts once the cartridge is plugged into your
printer.
SOFT FONT is a term used to describe laser printer fonts that are sold on
a floppy disk. These fonts must be sent to a laser printer, downloaded,
before they can be used. They are stored in RAM memory in your laser
printer. See the following sections for a much more detailed explanation
of soft fonts.
LASERJET RAM MEMORY
All LaserJet printers require a certain amount of RAM memory in order to
run. Determining exactly how much memory you will need for your printer
has never been an easy task.