Small Basic - About Fonts

About Fonts

A font’s a group of characters that share a style, called a typeface. For example, Times New Roman and Courier New are typefaces. A font’s also characterized by its size. In typography, the size of a font’s measured in points, where each point’s about 1/72 inch tall. For example, in a 12-point font, each character’s height is about 1/6 inch. But when you use any font in a graphics window, the height of the characters depends on the type of monitor you have.

Some fonts are stored on the hard disk as images; these are called raster fonts. MS Sans Serif is one example. These fonts look best when they’re drawn using their default font sizes. If you use a non-default font size, they’ll be scaled (enlarged or shrunk) to fit, but the result probably won’t look good.

Other fonts are stored on the hard disk as mathematical formulas, along with information that tells your computer how to display them. You can scale these true type fonts (like Times New Roman, Courier New, and Arial) to any size you want.

Use the FontName property of the GraphicsWindow object to tell Small Basic which font typeface you want. If you give it the name of a font that isn’t installed on your computer, then Small Basic picks an installed font that it thinks is similar to the one you set. Even though the font isn’t what you wanted for your application, your program should still work. But if you want to be sure you know what your text will look like, design your applications using fonts that are already installed on most computers. See the “Recommended Fonts” for more details.

Small and Basically yours,

   - Ninja Ed & Majed Marji