AFP fonts

A font is a collection of characters of a certain size, typeface, and type style. Each character in a font is identified by a 1-byte (single-byte) or a 2-byte (double-byte) code. The internal structure of fonts depends on whether the font is for a phonetic or a non-phonetic writing system. An example of a phonetic writing system is English. An example of a non-phonetic writing system is Kanji. Advanced Function Presentation™ (AFP™) fonts (or Font Object Content Architecture (FOCA) fonts) are the standard fonts used for Intelligent Printer Data Stream™ (IPDS™) output. AFP fonts are made up of a code page and a character set, which are described in greater detail later. All AFP fonts are encoded as either single-byte or double-byte fonts, depending on the language for which they are being used.

At least two resources are needed to make up a font: a font character set and a code page. The relationship between code pages and font character sets is illustrated in Figure 1. A third resource, a coded font, can define a font by naming a font character set and a code page.

Font character set

This resource contains the patterns for each character in the font and associates an 8-byte character identifier with each pattern. This resource also contains descriptive information for the entire character set.

Code page

This resource associates code points with character identifiers within a font character set, each representing a character pattern. A code point is an 8-bit binary number representing one of 256 potential characters.

Coded font

This resource associates one or more code pages with the appropriate font character sets.

Figure 1. Translation of a keyboard character into a printed character

Related tasks

Obtain AFP resources

Specify an AFP font