[Home]History of Bitmap font

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Revision 3 . . November 28, 2001 8:14 am by (logged).112.129.xxx [more detail about scaling]
Revision 2 . . (edit) November 28, 2001 8:08 am by Lee Daniel Crocker
Revision 1 . . November 28, 2001 6:55 am by Kwaku [from FOLDOC]
  

Difference (from prior major revision) (no other diffs)

Changed: 1,2c1,10
A bitmap font is one in which each character is stored as an array of pixels (a bitmap).
Such fonts are not easily scalable, in contrast to outline fonts (such as those used in PostScript).
A bitmap font is one that stores each glyph as an array of pixels (that is, a bitmap).

Scaling



Bitmap fonts look best at their native pixel size.
Many text rendering systems perform nearest-neighbor resampling, introducing ugly jagged edges.
A good system will perform anti-aliasing? on bitmap fonts whose size does not match the size that the application requests.
This works well for making the font smaller but not as well for increasing the size, as it tends to blur the edges.

A "trace" program can follow the outline of a high-resolution bitmap font and create an initial outline that a font designer uses to create an outline font useful in systems such as PostScript or TrueType.
Outline fonts scale easily without jagged edges or blurriness.

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