Manual InterForm400 English 2023

Apart from the predefined fonts, you can add additional fonts yourself. In general you should consider to add a universal font to get the best result with the smallest amount of work.

 

The most simple fonts are the resident fonts, that refer to font type faces. The type face is assumed to be known by the printer (or PDF viewer). If there is a problem with the result you should consider to link the font number with a soft font or to define a universal font instead.

 

You work with the resident fonts via these menu options:

 

80. Administering InterForm400

4. Work with fonts  

1. Description of additional fonts

 

Now you will see this:

 

 

                                                                               

NOTE: Commitment control is used in InterForm400 when you rename fonts in InterForm400 via option ‘7=Assign new font number’ as shown above. This is the only function in InterForm400 using commitment control. This is important to notice if you are running an iASP installation: The ASP group must be set prior to font renumbering.  

 

Pressing F6 to add a new font brings up the following screen:

 

 

Additional fonts must have a font ID in the interval 5000-9999, i.e. you can define up to 5100 fonts in addition to the predefined standard fonts. The other areas are reserved for bar code fonts.

 

In order to define a new font, we could for instance enter 9990 and we would get the following screen:

 

 

The description text will appear on overviews of fonts (prompt with F4).

 

The following information for your specific font can be collected by printing out a font list from your printer. This is a facility of the HP printers, and is common for many other compatible printers also. Alternatively, you can consult your printers technical reference for information on the resident fonts.

 

Spacing:        

Indicates whether the font is mono spaced (fixed pitch) or proportional spaced.

0=monospaced        

(This is used for fixed fonts like Courier and Letter Gothic. Fixed fonts are rare, so if in doubt your font is probably a proportional font.)        

1=Propotional spaced

(Used for most fonts)

 

Pitch:        

This field is only of importance if you have chosen monospaced spacing. Then enter e.g. 10,00 for 10 CPI. If you have chosen proportional spacing, just enter a value within the valid interval, as the width of the individual letters is relative to the height of the font.

 

Height:        

The height of a proportional font is expressed in typographical points. A point is 1/72 of an inch. A font height of 1/3 of an inch therefore has to be specified as 24,00. The height of a font is slightly greater than the distance from the top of a capital letter to the bottom of e.g. the letter "g".

 

Style:        

Style has the following meaning:

0=Upright                

(Normal font)

1=Italic

(Italic font)

 

Stroke weight:

This describes the thickness of the characters:

0=Medium                

(Normal font)

3=Bold

(Bold font)

Only use stroke weights supported by the printer. Unsupported values (normally anything but 0 and 3) are ignored and defaults to 0.

 

Typeface:        

This field has to be filled in with an ID-number of the typeface to be used. There is a lot of possible typefaces (refer to the font list or the technical reference of the printer). Here the normal scalable typefaces of the HP4 (PCL5e) are shown:

 

00000 = Line printer  

00003 = Courier      

04101 = CG Times      

04102 = Letter Gothic

04113 = Omega        

04113 = Coronet      

04140 = Clarendon    

04148 = Univers      

04168 = Antique Olive

04197 = Garamond

04297 = Marigold

04362 = Albertus

16602 = Arial    

16901 = Times New

 

You can press F1 on the screen above to see this list.

 

Symbol Set:

The symbol set of the font. Entering a symbol set here is normally for selecting special symbol character sets.

 

Override spacing:

Here you can override the spacing for fixed width fonts. If you e.g. use a 10 CPI courier font and override to 5 then the 10 CPI font is written with a spacing of 5 CPI.

 

Note that changing the above parameters does not change the appearance of the font unless a font matching the changes can be found in the printer. Print out a font list from the printers front panel to get an overview of available resident PCL fonts.

 

You can freely name the fonts as you please, but might be a good idea to consider a naming standard e.g. like for the font numbers created by the universal font wizard - here the two first digits indicate the type face, stoke weight and style and the last 2 digits indicate the font size.

 

 

Example of Defining a Resident Printer font

 

We want to define a 70 point Univers Bold Italic for use in our overlay definitions. We know this font is available as a resident scalable font in HP4 compatible printers.

 

First we must print out a Font List from the printer’s front panel. Refer to the User’s Guide of your printer.

 

Univers Bold Italic is listed on a HP4 Font List with the following PCL Escape Sequence:

 

 <Esc>(s1p__v1s3b4148T

 

If we break it up, we have the following information:

 

1p      = Proportional (Spacing)

___v    = Empty field for point size (Height)

1s      = Italic (Style)

3b      = Bold (Stroke Weight)

4148T   = Univers (Typeface)

“Blank” = Use the default

 

We now only need to define the font ID which will be used to select the font when designing forms. By pressing F4 we will get a list of the font ID’s between 5000 and 9999 which are already occupied.

 

In the following we have chosen font ID 7001 to represent our 70 point Univers font:

 

 

Now font 7001 and the description Univers Bold Italic 70 point will appear in the list of available fonts (prompted by F4) anywhere in the InterForm400 system where you can insert a font number.