Output Devices and WYSIWYG

Output devices are those devices (units) which we connect to computers to get information from them. The most common types of output devices are screens and printers. Generally when we think of fonts, we first think of computer's screen and then the printer. The reason may be that we compose text on the screen and then expect the output of the printer to resemble the displayed text. Most modern OSes and WordProcessors almost always achieves this for us. This service (or facility) is called 'What you see is what you get', in short WYSIWYG (pronounced as 'vizivig').

Almost all the printers and screens, print or display everything by composing points. There are different types of screens and printers. Some of the differences between various devices are because of resolution (number of points/dots per inch, i.e. dpi), color models (CMYK for printers and RGB for screens), etc.

So to achieve WYSIWYG, computers need to compose the page differently while printing as per the specification of the printer and preferably send the page as a bitmap/picture. Another method is to send text and 'formatting instructions' and let the printer compose and print the page. For this to happen even for plain English text, printer should have corresponding fonts available. Sometimes computers send applicable fonts to the printer before the text to be printed.

Fonts and Printers

From the perspective of printers we can classify fonts as either a) resident fonts or b) downloadable fonts.

Resident (internal) fonts are those fonts which are embedded (i.e. pre-loaded) in printers' read-only memory. Various high end printers also support font cartridges. When we use these resident or cartridge fonts to print text, we don't have to send font from computer to printer, and printing is relatively fast. For volume printing people generally used to prefer resident or cartridge fonts!

Downloadable fonts are those fonts which are copied (downloaded) from computers to a printers for use in subsequent printing. Downloadable fonts are generally bitmap fonts and consume lot of memory.

Soft Fonts

The downloadable fonts are also called 'soft fonts'. (please note the space between 'soft' and 'fonts'.) As Hewlett-Packard's PCL is a very popular 'printer control language', most of the 'soft fonts' are 'HP PCL soft fonts'.

There are lots of low end (mainly ink-jet and dot-matrix) printers which do not support 'soft fonts'. In that case computers send text as bitmaps/pictures.

People used to create soft fonts either from outline fonts like ttf fonts or from scratch!

Now-a-days OpenType (enhanced TrueType) is being preferred for complex scripts. OpenType demand advanced rendering services (for rich typography) which are not available in printers!

So, AS FAR AS WE KNOW, it is practically impossible to create useful soft font(s) of a complex script OpenType font.

softfonts.com

We don't sell any 'soft font'! We chose this domain name 'softfonts.com' because it was the shortest, sweetest and relevant available name as we are in the business of developing 'software' (small ones) and 'fonts'. You will agree that it is very difficult these days to get a decent name.

Incidentally the first font that our director Akhilesh Gupta designed (in 1991) was a 'PCL soft font'. He wrote a rudimentary bitmap font editor in 'C' programming language for that! He says it was the first and probably last time he used a tool extensively that he himself created. Neither that tool was good nor that font...