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Chapter 4 - Font Manager / About the Font Manager

Synthetic Fonts

You may want your application to handle fonts that have a font depth greater than the normal 1-bit depth. (The font depth is the number of bits per pixel; it is specified in bits 2 and 3 of the fontType field of the bitmapped font resource, which is described beginning on page 4-66. The Font Manager supports font depths of 1, 2, 4, and 8 bits.) An advantage of using fonts with a larger font depth is that the Font Manager draws bitmapped fonts to the screen considerably faster if the font depth matches the screen depth specified by the user in the Monitors control panel.

The Font Manager can create a synthetic font from a 'FONT' or bitmapped font resource (but not from an outline font resource) by expanding the 1-bit font into a font that matches the current screen depth. The Font Manager creates and maintains synthetic fonts internally, for performance reasons. However, if there is not enough memory to support synthetic fonts, the Font Manager displays a font at 1-bit depth, no matter what the current screen depth is. Font manufacturers can specify that the Font Manager should not expand a font by setting bit 14 of the fontType field of the bitmapped font resource.