Fonts and Typefaces
The style and design of a printer’s character set, that is, block, script, or another style, is its
fontor typeface. Figure 17-6 shows a sampling of some of the more common fonts. Word
processing and graphics software now offer literally thousands of font styles and type-
faces, but not every printer can handle every font. For example, a daisy wheel printer has
only one font per wheel and to change the font, the wheel must be changed. Early dot ma-
trix printers offered between 2 to 16 fonts depending on the number of pins in the print
head. Most dot matrix printers either have a set of fonts built in or have them loaded by
installation software. Laser and inkjet printers are able to produce just about any font the
PC can generate because they treat the document as a graphic image. How many fonts
these printers can handle is often more dependent on how much memory is available
rather than how many fonts are available.
Print Styles Fonts can be modified with print styles. A print style is applied to empha-
size a character, word, title, etc. Figure 17-7 shows samples of the four standard print
styles. The styles used with most fonts are as follows:
Normal The natural typeface of the font.
Boldface This print style darkens the type. (The wordboldfaceat the
beginning of this item is in bold style.)
Italics This print style normally tilts the typeface slightly to the right.
Underline This print style places a horizontal line beneath the type.
Strikeout Often called strikethrough in word processors, this font style places
a horizontal line in the middle of the character.Print Size Another feature of a font is its scalability, which is its ability to be printed in
different character sizes. Font size is measured in points. A point is 1/72ndof an inch;
Chapter 17: Printers^409
Figure 17-6. Samples of common fonts