background on fonts

Much of the remainder of this chapter addresses working with different fonts. Before you get involved with specific code, however, you’ll benefit from having a firm grasp of the basics of fonts as they are implemented in Windows.

The Types of Fonts

Windows supports two broad categories of fonts, called "GDI fonts” and "device fonts.” The GDI fonts are stored in files on your hard disk. Device fonts are native to an output device. For example, it is common for printers to have a collection of built-in device fonts.

GDI fonts come in three flavors: raster fonts, stroke fonts, and TrueType fonts.

A raster font is sometimes also called a bitmap font, because each character is stored as a bitmap pixel pattern. Each raster font is designed ...

Get Programming Windows®, Fifth Edition 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.