Using Intel® Visual Fortran to Create and Build Windows*-Based Applications

ID 757211
Date 7/23/2021
Public
Document Table of Contents

Available Typefaces

A fontis a set of text characters of a particular size and style.

A typeface (or type style) refers to the style of the displayed characters -- Arial, for example, or Times New Roman.

Type size measures the screen area occupied by individual characters. The term comes from the printer's lexicon, but uses screen pixels as the unit of measure rather than the traditional points. For example, "Courier 12 9" denotes the Courier typeface, with each character occupying a screen area of 12 vertical pixels by 9 horizontal pixels. The word "font", therefore implies both a typeface and a type size.

The QuickWin Library font routines use all Windows operating system installed fonts. The first type of font used is a bitmap (or raster-map) font. Bitmap fonts have each character in a binary data map. Each bit in the map corresponds to a screen pixel. If the bit equals 1, its associated pixel is set to the current screen color. Bit values of 0 appear in the current background color.

The second type of font is called a TrueType font. Some screen fonts look different on a printer, but TrueType fonts print exactly as they appear on the screen. TrueType fonts may be bitmaps or soft fonts (fonts that are downloaded to your printer before printing), depending on the capabilities of your printer. TrueType fonts are scalable and can be sized to any height. It is recommended that you use TrueType fonts in your graphics programs.

Each type of font has advantages and disadvantages. Bitmapped characters appear smoother on the screen because of the predetermined pixel mapping. However, they cannot be scaled. You can scale TrueType text to any size, but the characters sometimes do not look quite as solid as the bitmapped characters on the screen. Usually this screen effect is hardly noticeable, and when printed, TrueType fonts are as smooth or smoother than bitmapped fonts.

The bitmapped typefaces come in preset sizes measured in pixels. The exact size of any font depends on screen resolution and display type.