About fonts
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A font is a set of characters (letters, numbers, and symbols), that share a common weight, width and style, such as 10pt Times Roman.
Typefaces (often called font families) are collections of fonts that share an overall appearance, and are designed to be used together, such as Times.
A type style is a variant version of an individual font in a font family. Typically, the Roman, Regular or Plain (the name may vary from family to family) member of a font family is the base font, and the family may include other type styles such as Bold, Semibold, Italic, Bold italic, Heavy, Condended etc.
GN4 uses standard TTF, OTF or Type I fonts for display and printing, but it uses the internal GN4 font metrics for character displacement. All fonts in use by GN4 have to be installed in the Microsoft Windows font folder, but only the fonts that are installed also in GN4 can be used for text formatting. Supported font formats The system uses TrueType or Open Type fonts, or Type I fonts, imported to Microsoft Windows (PFM and PFB extension) to display fonts. Multiple master fonts are not currently supported. Fonts with class-based kerning are not currently supported. |
GN4 font metrics, ie. typographic information (width, height, kerning) for each character in a font is stored in the database. Database contains font code (ordinal number), font name, screen font to use for video rendering, Postscript font file (if any) to download to the output device if the font is not present, font metrics, and kerning pair values for the font. Every font also has an associated font layout that specifies which characters are defined, their type, and Postscript and XML character names. This additional information makes it easy to use fonts with non-standard layouts such as symbol fonts or custom made fonts. They can be used, printed and displayed in true WYSIWYG. For more in-depth information, see Font metrics properties. |
GN4 supports only pair-based kerning, but non class-based kerning or other variants. |
A default font for printing is always specified in the formats used for justification, so it is not necessary to specify a 'default font' at the system level. Bold and italic are never considered variations of a base font. Rather, they are a different PostScript font. Other variations like underline, superscript or subscript are defined using markup commands and are not inside the font. |
GN4 support Unicode fonts and it requires UNICODE font layout. See also Unicode fonts. |
This is not supported. |
When printing text, GN4 automatically downloads the Postscript font specified in the font table if a font is not available on an output device, or creates one on-the-fly from TTF or OTF font and sends it to the device. |
See Installing fonts in the Configuring Fonts chapter. |
See also