Characters exist in many sizes and shapes. The following sections describe how characters are altered in GDI to produce a particular font.
For an italic font, GDI skews the characters so that they appear slanted. When italicized, the base of the character remains intact while the upper portion shifts to the right. The greatest amount of shifting occurs at the top of the character, the least amount at the base. Figure 2.13 shows characters before and after being italicized:
A font is made bold by increasing its weight, which refers to the thickness of the lines or strokes that compose a character. Fonts with a heavy weight are referred to as bold. Figure 2.14 shows normal and bold characters:
An underline font has a line under each character. When a character is underlined, a solid line appears directly below the baseline of the character cell. Figure 2.15 shows underlined characters:
A strikeout font has a solid horizontal line drawn through each character. The position of this line within each character cell is constant for a given font. Figure 2.16 shows characters that are struck out: