TransAct Technologies ITHERM 280 - Manual (Page 259)

iTherm ® 280 Programmer’s Guide ITherm® 280 Unicode and Fonts
28-07764 Rev C Page 257
Unicode and Fonts
Fonts
Your TransAct
® ITherm 280 printer uses outline and/or stroke based scalable fonts. These fonts
provide you with additional font options as well as improved character appearance, while
functioning transparently within legacy applications.
Such fonts represent a substantial improvement to the so-called bitmap fonts that are
traditionally used for thermal printers, which are based on a pixel by pixel definition of
characters. With a fixed size and fixed character spacing, these bitmap fonts were limited to
specific magnification factors from 2-8X, and required scaling and smoothing at larger font
sizes. Moreover, such scaling and smoothing operations were often unsuitable for complex
fonts such as Asian characters, where changes to pixel layout actually risk changing character
meanings.
To take full advantage of scalable fonts, the ITherm 280 supports additional commands and
features, including:
1) Character size selection by points
2) Character pitch selection by points
3) Variable character spacing if desired
4) Custom fonts
5) Unicode support for international language support
6) Enhanced code page support for ASCII based applications.
Character Generation
The font technology in the ITherm 280 printer uses standard outline fonts (sometimes referred
to as TrueType fonts) or stroke fonts. Both technologies are scalable, however each has unique
advantages.
Outline characters
Outline characters use points along the edge of the character to describe the
character. The character generator defines the edge and then fills in the
enclosed space to define the character.
This type of character generation produces very well formed characters and
produces the best looking characters. However, it requires more storage than
stroke fonts, and is best for non-Asian fonts.