Handling fonts
Contents
Document files may contain all, some or none of the fonts that are needed to make the document. When a font required by the document on view is not downloaded as part of the file, 
EscapeE will attempt to match it with one in its resident library. EscapeE is delivered with a set of definitions which make use of some of the standard Windows fonts. These are in a file called WINFONTS.FIF, but if you save fonts to the resident font library, a file is created which is specific to your system (called RESIDENT.FIF in the PCL Resident Font Library). If there is no exact match with any of the library fonts then the nearest one is chosen, which may result in a some variation in the appearance of the text, see Viewing font information.
The demonstration edition of EscapeE is supplied with a set of fonts that simulate the printer's Courier, Letter Gothic, Univers, Line-printer and HP-GL Stick fonts and also uses the standard Windows fonts Arial, Times New Roman, Symbol and Wingdings from your system. The standard Windows (19U) symbol set is provided, together with the PC symbol set for the standard fixed pitch fonts (10U). EscapeE can create most other symbol sets from the 19U set by remapping.
You may purchase a TrueType font pack for matching the built-in fonts on printers such as the HP4 and later models and a font pack for fixed pitch fonts: Email sales@redtitan.com. RedTitan can also supply customized fonts to order: please contact help@redtitan.com.
EscapeE '.SUB' files can be generated to organize the substitution of fonts, see Setting up a Font Substitute file. Different substitute fonts may be used for viewing on-screen and on paper: see Selecting substitute fonts.
A warning triangle on the Tool-bar will alert you to any problems with font mismatching. You can see the text that uses any fonts that were not completely matched against available downloaded or library fonts by ticking the Show selected fonts in red option. (If the text of a substitute font is actually red, this option defaults to blue instead!) You can view details of the font, and whether it is a substitute, by right-clicking the text.
If you have problems reading a file after export, it may be because the download fonts were created in a different symbolset when the PCL file was generated. For example, an IBM mainframe could create fonts with EBCDIC character encoding. You can try reading the file into EscapeE again and selecting a different symbolset from the 'Symbolset conversion' list, see About symbolsets. Download fonts are often protected by permuting the character codes (e.g. HP3 printer drivers) so that they make nonsense of the extracted text. EscapeE, however, can recognize characters either optically (see Using plugins) or by matching the character data in the downloaded font. Character recognition codes may be set up in a database (using 
EEfonts, accessible from 'Fonts' menu, see Character codes) or assigned individually, see Assigning character codes.
Some printer drivers specify inappropriate point sizes, which can cause problems if font substitution or character recognition are required. EscapeE has an option (Calculate download font characteristics) that enables more appropriate values for point size, weight and style to be applied instead.
As an alternative to including all the fonts for a PCL page with each page file, you may opt to export all the fonts for a multi-page job in a separate file. The fonts-file may be installed in the Resident font library, supplied as the first of a list of files, or specified as a header file. This reduces the size of each page file while ensuring that the printer has all the fonts it needs for the job right from the start.
TrueType fonts downloaded with PCL files may be embedded in PDF files on export, either whole or (to reduce file-sizes) in subsets.
Users may reset the font and image library search paths.
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