A. Discussion of Fonts Fonts are local to the operating system of the Macintosh. The fonts that you see listed for the software that you use depends entirely on what FONT resources been installed into that system environment. Every size of every font is defined in this manner for every character of the font. These definitions correspond to the keys of the keyboard. Fonts can be grouped according to some appearance characteristics.
Most Fonts are proportional, i.e. the spacing of the letters depends upon the width of the letters.
This method works fine in the simple case of the Macintosh screen and the ImageWriter printer when the selection of fonts and sizes is acceptable. To gain more flexibility in type faces, a software technology was developed to allow characters of a font to be mathematically calculated, usually using spline curves. In this case, the print information is sent to the printer as a collection of text containing instructions in the PostScript computer programming language as to the font, size and orientation of the text. The printer then calculates how the text is to appear on the page. The font shown on the screen is a bit-mapped font counterpart that most closely approximates the appearance of the text as it will appear on the LaserWriter page.