One of the greatest contributions of computers has been in our offices. They have become an essential part of any organization, whether it is in the form of presentations or word documents. One great advantage that computers have over other typing tools is that they allow you to use various fonts. The fonts used in computers are basically a data file, which contains a set of glyphs.
There are primarily three types of computer fonts, which are Raster, Outline, and Stroke fonts. The Raster fonts are a collection of pixels that end up representing the image of the glyph. Then there are Outline fonts which are also called Vector fonts.
These fonts use a Bezier Curve (which is a parametric curve often used in computer graphics), along with mathematical formulae to describe every glyph. Stroke fonts make use of various specified lines and a lot of additional information to get the profile, size and overall appearance of the glyph.
Out of the above mentioned fonts, the Raster can be shown in different sizes with slight distortion, but it renders very quickly. The other two formats can be displayed without distortion but rendering them takes time as pixels have to be drawn from scratch.
Fonts can also be categorized as moonscape or proportional. In proportional fonts each glyph takes a different amount of space, whereas all characters take the same space in proportional fonts. Fonts are created using font editors, and there are some fonts that are designed only for computer screens and are called screen fonts. |