HP PCL/PJL reference (PCL 5 Printer Language) - Technical Reference Manual Part II

EN Glossary-13
Serial I/O
An input/output (I/O) interface that transmits information bit-by-bit (in
“serial” mode). RS-232 is an industry-wide standard form of a serial
interface.
Soft Font
Soft fonts are fonts stored on disks. These fonts can be transferred to
the printer’s memory and used the same way as cartridge or resident
fonts.
Spacing
Fonts have either fixed or proportional spacing. Fixed-spaced
fonts are those for which the inter-character spacing is constant.
In proportionally-spaced fonts, inter-character spacing varies with
the natural shape of a character.
Stroke Weight
Stroke weight describes the thickness of the strokes that compose
characters. Medium and bold are examples of stroke weights.
Style
Font style is defined by the angularity of the strokes of the characters
with respect to the X-axis. Upright, italic, and condensed are
examples of font styles.
Symbol Index
This is a grouping of symbols. An unbound font has the capacity to
be bound to a set of symbols selected from a complementary
Symbol Index (such as the Unicode or the MSL symbol indexes).
Each symbol in the index is identified by a unique symbol index
number. Appendix D of the PCL 5 Comparison Guide contains lists
of MSL and Unicode symbol index characters and their numbers
(also see Unicode or MSL).