Dell 3000cn Color Laser Printer - Manual (Page 109)

In proportional (or typographic) fonts, every character can have a different width. Since proportional fonts have characters
with different widths, the font size is specified in point size, not pitch. Point size refers to the height of the characters in the
font. A point is defined as 1/72 inch. The characters in a font printed at 24 point will be twice as large as the characters in the
same font printed at 12 point.
The following illustration shows samples of a font printed in different point sizes:
The point size of a font is defined as the distance from the top of the tallest character in the font to the bottom of the lowest
character in the font. Due to the definition of point size, different fonts printed at the same point size may appear quite
different in size. This is because there are other font parameters that affect how the font looks. However, the point size of a
font is an excellent specification of the relative size of a font. The following examples illustrate two very different proportional
fonts at 14 point:
Bitmapped and Scalable Fonts
The printer uses both bitmapped and scalable fonts.
Bitmapped fonts are stored in printer memory as predefined patterns of bits that represent a typeface at a specific size, style,
and resolution. The following illustration shows an example of a character from a bitmapped font.