From: bruce@ais.com
Newsgroups: comp.windows.ms
Subject: Re: Bummed about Truetype
Date: 13 Apr 92 11:09:01 GMT
Organization: Applied Information Systems, Chapel Hill, NC

In article <3439@balrog.ctron.com>, frankp@ctron.com (Frank Perreault) writes:
> In article <0qFViB1w164w@upchrch.UUCP> joel@upchrch.UUCP (Joel Upchurch  ) writes:
>>I installed Windows 3.1 yesterday and tried printing some documents using
>>the TrueType fonts. It was taking about four minutes a page. After
>>fumbling around and checking it, I found that it apparently sends out
>>a bitmap instead of downloading the font for my printer. I checked the
>>Laserjet drivers and it does the same thing for all the HPs before the
>>Series II.
>>
>>I got on Genie and read some articles in the Microsoft Knowledgebase.
>>Apparently Truetype will only download fonts if the printer supports
>>downloading partial fonts.
> 
> Not being an employee of Microsoft I can't give the definitive answer but
> I believe the reason behind sending down the bitmaps is because of the
> ability to scale fonts. If Windows (or ATM) couldn't handle font scaling
> and thereby ship the image via bitmap down to the printer, you would have
> to have a font for every style and pitch size that you wanted to use. I
> don't know about you but I don't have a 1G hard drive.
> 
> Now as for the reason of why they only download fonts if the printer supports 
> a partial download I can see the reason being that you would spend alot a
> time downloading fonts for characters that you would never print with.
> Granted, shipping a bitmap is not a fast affair but as you can see in all
> the literature for Windows word processors they really advertise the fact
> that you can put loads of fonts on one page using all sorts of sizes.

I think you are misunderstanding where the rasterized versions of the TrueType
fonts are being placed.  They *DON'T* go on your hard disk (unless you are
downloading a font to a printer with a hard disk ... not a common situation,
printers with hard disks are relatively rare & high-end devices).  The True
Type rasterized fonts are kept in RAM, & discarded if memory is needed & that
font size & style hasn't been used for a while.

It's going to be a document-by-document question whether downloading the
entire font for each size & style is going to be faster than sending an
entire bitmap for the device.  Lots of documents use only one or two font
style/size combinations, for these cases downloading the whole font would
be a big win over doing a page-sized bitmap.

Since this is a situation that is document-dependent, it would make sense
to allow the user to choose whether to download the whole font or to do a
whole-page bitmap - I think that's the original question.  I don't know
why Windows doesn't do this;  it could certainly be supported in the
printer driver as it is, it wouldn't require any changes to the baseline
Windows product.  I don't know offhand if the driver was written by
Microsoft or by HP (some of the drivers were provided by other manufacturers
rather than by MS), perhaps you should look at the copyright notice for
the printer driver & register your suggestion with the appropriate
manufacturer -

Bruce C. Wright