About Fonts

To a person trained in the mechanics of manuscript composition or familiar with standard typography, some of the typographic terms used in this overview may be unusual. Most of the differences between standard typography and text on Microsoft Windows reflect changes in technology. The original typographic terms were based on hot-metal composition, whereas the terms used here, which appear as member names for the font and text output structures, reflect a new technology based on laser-printer output and composition performed on a personal computer using desktop publishing software.

The following sections discuss fonts:

• Font Elements
• Font Families
• Raster, Vector, TrueType, and OpenType Fonts
• Character Sets Used by Fonts
• Font Installation and Deletion
• Fonts from Multiple Resource Files
• Font Creation and Selection
• Embedded Fonts