Fonts & Encodings

A.3. The Windows World

The malicious say that there is a connection between the names FNT of Microsoft and NFNT of Apple, as well as between Microsoft's FON and Apple's FOND. That is not so: aside from the fact that both cases combine a single bitmap font with a font "family", their approaches have very little in common.

A.3.1. The FNT Format

Bitmap FNT Fonts

FNT is a format for individual bitmap fonts. The latest update of this format dates to 1991, which was before the advent of the TrueType format; but it already gives us a foretaste of the parameters that we shall see a few years later in the TrueType fonts.

The reason is that the FNT fonts of Windows, unlike Apple's NFNT fonts, are crawling with global parameters of all kinds [45].

• "Typographical" parameters: the optical size (!); the vertical and horizontal resolutions for which the font was designed; the number of pixels above the baseline; two types of leading (internal leading, which can include accents or other marks, and external leading, which must be left white); the presence of italics, underscoring, or strikethrough; the weight (on a scale between 1 and 1,000, with 400 being the average value); the size of the grid on which the glyphs were designed; the average set-width; the maximum set-width; the font's name.

• Parameters for "organization": the version of the format (2 for fonts meant for Windows 2 and 3 for fonts meant for Windows 3 and later); the font's type (bitmap or vector); the font's copyright notice; the ...