A.6. Other Less Common Bitmap Formats
Other bitmap formats exist. Usually they are connected to hardware manufacturers. For instance, the Hewlett-Packard printers, at one time, used a font format called HP Soft Font [176, Chapter 7], with the file extensions .sfp ('p' for "portrait") and .sfl ('l' for "landscape"). Why did we need two different formats for portrait mode and landscape mode? Because these printers' page-description language (called "PCL") did not by default support the automatic rotation of glyphs when we switched from one printing format to the other. Being accustomed to the PostScript language, we no longer think about problems of this kind.
Get Fonts & Encodings now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
