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Fonts are the different styles of typefaces used by a computer to display text.
If you are like most people, you are probably looking at text in many different sizes and you may even want to print out a document. Early computer operating systems relied on bitmapped fonts for display and printing. These fonts had to be individually created for display at each particular size desired. If you made the font larger or smaller than it was intended to be, it looked horrible. And printed text was almost always very jagged looking.