PCL helped change the appearance of low-cost printer documents from poor to exceptional quality. Fonts Fonts are characters of a specific style and size within an overall typeface design. Printers use resident fonts and soft fonts to print documents. Resident fonts are built into the hardware of a printer. They are also called internal fonts or built-in fonts.
All printers come with one or more resident fonts.
Additional fonts can be added by inserting a font cartridge into the printer or installing soft fonts to the hard drive. Resident fonts cannot be erased unlike soft fonts. Soft fonts are installed onto the hard drive and then sent to the computer's memory when a document is printed that uses the particular soft font. Soft fonts can be purchased in stores or downloaded from the Internet. There are two types of fonts used by the printer and screen display, bitmap fonts and outline fonts.