Is there a way to download a font to a printer during the print process?
Unless you are printing directly to the printer (sending ASCII and control characters), there is no need to deal with FONTS and the PRINTER… since you are not printing “text” to the printer, but rather a “graphic image”… and therefore the FONT informtion you would be using is on the computer not the printer
We are sending text to the printer. If a font is installed on a windows machine and sent to a printer that doesnt have the font installed, the text has the correct widths (from the installed font on the win machine), but defaults to arial (I believe).
So you are not using the printer drivers built into the OS?
you are sending a stream of text and control characters to control the printer directly?
Or you are misunderstanding how this whole thing should work.
Normally (since at least the late 90’s)… macOS/Windows and the like rarely sent text/control streams to activate printing features such as fonts, bold, italic etc (that was the mainstay of dot-matrix printers). Rather they create a graphic image of the page using the resources (fonts etc) available to the COMPUTER, and then printed that graphic to the printer, this resulted in higher quality output, and made the need for specific fonts and features on the printer to be no longer an issue.
So if the font is installed on the computer, the FONT is NOT send to the printer… just a graphic depiction of the page to be printed, but yes that DOES require the font to be installed on the COMPUTER, but this has always been the case.
I’m just using the typical graphics commands in Xojo:
g.textsize = 12
g.bold = true
g.DrawString "Test", 450,723
This all works fine when printing from a Mac, but from windows, if the font is not installed on the printer (in this case Arial Narrow) the text defaults to Arial. This happens with any font that is not installed on the printer. I figure that I must be missing something or this would be a reported issue.
Again… the font must be installed on the COMPUTER… the printer fonts are not relavant…
[quote=342276:@Gary Russell]I’m just using the typical graphics commands in Xojo:
g.textsize = 12
g.bold = true
g.DrawString "Test", 450,723
This all works fine when printing from a Mac, but from windows, if the font is not installed on the printer (in this case Arial Narrow) the text defaults to Arial. This happens with any font that is not installed on the printer. I figure that I must be missing something or this would be a reported issue.[/quote]
You may want to look at you printer driver. In Windows 10, it is not longer necessary, but in the past, you could chose between downloading fonts or sending them as graphics.
I might be misdiagnosing the problem here but on a Mac everything prints fine, on a windows machine, with the font installed, it looks like a missing printer font (like the old days of installing matching fonts on the printers). The font is in fact missing from the printer. We are printing from Win 7, Win 10 and Mac OS.
And I am curious, if the printer fonts are truly not relevant, why are there a few hundred fonts installed on the printers? Or are they not relevant when using a Xojo app?
They are not relevant to modern GUI based applications (not just Xojo)… If there are in fact fonts installed on the printer itself, they are most likely for legacy non-gut applications… I haven’t wondered or worried about what fonts are or are not installed on a printer for almost 20 years now.
In Win 10, AFAIK printer fonts are no longer needed. In previous versions, as I said, you had the choice in the printer drivers. Buil-in fonts are largely a remain of the past in modern printers. However, some apps still tap directly into the printer without graphic driver, so it does not cost much for printer makers to keep the fonts.
Mac has disposed of that antiquated system since the early days of Mac OS.
Arial Narrow has been an issue since historic times. For some reason, it has been neglected by printer makers . With Xojo, you can emulate it by playing on XScale to compress regular Arial.
I think I’ve got a handle on this now. Thanks to both of you for the help. Much appreciated.
Hi Gary
It is more important to have to font installed on the computer performing the printing.
Postscript drivers will send font data to the printer if it is not present. Other drivers will rasterise the entire page and send what is basically a large picture.
Kev