Printer User Manual

Using Asian (Double-Byte) TrueType Fonts

Previously, Monarch printers supported downloadable fonts, but

with limited code pages. Characters are represented by character

code pages. These fonts are designed to be regionally specific;

therefore, all code pages may not be supported in a given font.

For example, using Code Page 1252 (Latin 1), index 192

(represented as

~192

in an MPCL batch packet) prints this

character,

. The 9850 printer previously supported single-byte

character sets, which provided 255 different characters.

However, the 9850 printer now supports printing double-byte

character sets, which provide over 65,000 characters.

Double-byte character sets are typically used in Asian (Far East)

countries. Code pages, such as 932 (Japanese Shift JIS) are

available. Each code page contains several thousand characters.

To access these characters in an MPCL batch packet, you need to

pick a specific code page and a specific type of font encoding.

One standard font encoding is Unicode. Unicode is a double-byte

(16-bit) encoding that includes many characters used throughout

the world. Each Unicode index refers to a particular character,

just like the index in a code page. Other double-byte font

encodings exist for specific characters, such as BIG5 (Traditional

Chinese), GB2312 (Simplified Chinese) and SJIS (Japanese

Shift-JIS).

Double-Byte Bitmap Fonts

Double-byte bitmap fonts, like single-byte bitmap fonts, are

smaller and may image faster than TrueType fonts. When you

create a double-byte bitmap font, you must specify a particular

point size and code page. The batch data character mapping

must match the code page of the font. For example, a BIG5

bitmap font must use BIG5 batch data.

B-22

Fonts