5.6.1 Selecting Printer Fonts

Fonts take up disk space and printer memory. Planning which fonts are needed and installing only those fonts can save disk space. Selecting fonts is a subjective process. It requires making tradeoffs between document design and computer memory, disk space, printer memory, and printing speed.

The recommendations presented in this section are based upon experience gained from working with Windows and soft fonts. The intent of these recommendations is to help you optimize the amount of disk space and printer memory used by soft fonts. Some of the recommendations indicate that you should not load certain variations of fonts; you may want to experiment to determine if the additional expense in print time and disk space is worth including these fonts.

It is recommended that you load the typographic range of point sizes and limiting documents to using these sizes. The typographic range is as follows:

6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 18, 24, 30, 48, 60, 72

Better yet, if you know exactly which sizes you normally use in a document, load only those sizes. For example, a document may use only the following point sizes of MS Sans Serif:

11 point for body text
9 point for running headers, running footers, and footnotes
14, 24, and 30 point bold for subheads and headlines

By loading only these sizes, you reduce the number of fonts taking up disk space.

It is recommended that you generate normal and italic for all point sizes, and bold for point sizes equal to and above 14 points. The driver for Hewlett-Packard printers that use PCL has the capability to simulate bold text. It will not look the same as the true bold face, so you may want to experiment first (for example, print a document with bold type but with no bold loaded, and then load the bold and reprint the document). Normally, however, the driver-simulated bold is adequate for the small point sizes.

To save on even more space, we recommend that you load bold only for the larger sizes (that is, 24 points and above). The assumption is that you will only use bold sizes for headlines.

Avoid loading bold italic for a font. Bold italic consumes disk space and printer memory and, because bold italic is rarely used, it does not warrant the space it requires. As an alternative, the driver will simulate bold italic by synthetically bolding the italic face.

Character sets can make a big difference in the amount of disk space and printer memory used by a font. If the document never uses accented characters or special symbols like the bullet and copyright, it is recommended that you use the USASCII character set. If the document requires these characters, use the Windows ANSI, ECMA-94, or Roman-8 character sets (listed in order of preference, depending upon which sets you have access to).

Fonts in the USASCII character set contain a little more than half the number of characters contained in the Windows ANSI, ECMA-94, and Roman-8 character sets. By selecting USASCII, you effectively half the amount of disk space and printer memory used by the font. We recommend using, in order of preference, Windows ANSI, ECMA-94, or Roman-8 for point sizes below 14 points and USASCII for point sizes 14 points and above.