TransAct Technologies ITHERM 280 - Manual (Page 263)

iTherm ® 280 Programmer’s Guide ITherm® 280 Unicode and Fonts
28-07764 Rev C Page 261
Custom Fonts
The ITherm 280 supports TrueType fonts. There are several companies that will provide
custom character sets. The ITherm 280 uses fonts provided by Monotype. You can contract
Monotype through their website www.fonts.com, or by phone in U.S. & Canada (toll-free 1-800-
424-8973, directly at 1-781-970-6020), or the United Kingdom (Free Phone 0800 371242, direct
+44 (0)1737 765959.)
Stacked or Linked fonts
The ITherm 280 also uses a font stacking technology where fonts are linked together. This
means that as each character is looked up, the first font in the stack containing the character is
then printed. For example, if a customer would like to replace several standard characters with
custom characters, a user defined font can be provided that would, if first in the link, replace the
characters n the standard font.
It may also be desirable to stack fonts to provide a precedent for how individual characters are
looked up. For example:
•
An application may wish to alter the appearance of several characters for security.
•
It might be necessary to define a group of special symbols for a specific
application.
•
It might be necessary to supplement a font with special characters like OCR
characters.
To provide this flexibility, the ITherm 280 has the ability to link up to 8 fonts together. When this
is done, the first font in the link is searched first. If the character is not defined, the next font in
the link is searched. This process is continued until the character is found or the last font is
searched.
There are two ways to define a linked font. This first is to define a default linked font in the
POR.INI file. If it link font is defined in the POR.INI file, it will be selected as the default power
on font. Selecting font 0 will select the linked font provided that a link font is defined.
It is also possible to dynamically define a linked font. This requires that the fonts to be linked be
aliased to a font id in the POR.INI file. Defining a linked font does not necessarily activate it. If
the linked font was not already active, it must be selected by selecting font 0.
Font Storage
The ITherm 280 supports a Flash file system used to store fonts, custom graphic and custom
macros. A file system interface is provided for this system, where the host application may
download files. In addition, TransAct Technologies provides a file loading tool that runs on
Windows
® based systems.
To allow flexible and easy support for all kinds of fonts, fonts are stored in the ITherm 280
printer as a standard font file. These files are typically not visible to the user, however; TransAct
Technologies provides a support tool that will allow the user to load their own font directly from
Windows and change the way fonts are printed. It is also possible for the host application to
load fonts into the printer.
The printer can contain up to 99 unique and selectable fonts. Any font may be selected at any
time. In addition up to 8 fonts may be linked or stacked together. Some standard character size