Reference: About Outlines and Bitmaps
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In a Bitmap font (aka "raster" font), each character is made up from lines of black and white pixels stacked into a rectangular cell, like a mosaic of tiles. Each font contains characters in just one size, style and weight, even if the fonts are in the same 'family'. Bitmapped fonts are best suited to jobs requiring a few, small fonts.
Outline fonts are scalable: a whole series of sizes can be derived from one font. This is very efficient if you need to use several sizes in the same font family. Some print drivers can be configured to store the font in the the PCL file in outline form or they may rasterize it and store it in bitmapped form, one font per point size.
TrueType fonts are 'outline' type fonts but they may include some bitmapped characters too. In Western fonts, most characters are derived from the outline and bitmapped characters only used for the smallest sizes, if at all. Some 'outline' Chinese fonts, however, may in fact contain some characters as bitmaps but not outlines.
| • | In  EscapeE you can click on Fonts|Downloaded fonts to see if any are recorded as scalable in the 'Size' column.Alternatively, to see if a particular piece of text uses outline (scalable) fonts or bitmap, just right-click on it and choose Font properties. This character matching only applies to downloaded fonts, so this process is irrelevant unless the font type is 'download'. |
| o | If the font type is 'download' and it is 'scalable' you will need to choose the outline option, otherwise |
| o | choose the bitmap option. |
| • | You can see from EscapeE's Fonts|Fonts in use table just which sizes of which fonts are used in a particular PCL file. Commonly used point-sizes are enumerated for convenience but you can sweep-out and delete any point-sizes that are not required or type-in any (integer) point size missing from the list. |
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