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GraphicsAcademy.com  >  Glossary  >  Raster Font

Raster Font

A raster font (also known as a "bitmap font") is a font where each character's glyph is defined by a bitmap

In Microsoft Windows, raster fonts are stored in FNT files.

The main problem with raster fonts is that they do not scale well. They can look distorted if scaled down from the size defined in the bitmaps (Windows bypasses (but doesn't solve) this problem by not scaling raster fonts below their minimum size), and can suffer from jaggies if scaled up.

The jaggies problem is illustrated by the following image, where both lines of text are drawn using the same font, at different sizes, but the larger sized text clearly shows jaggies.

raster font jaggies

Other alternative font technologies have addressed these scaling problems:
  • Vector fonts do not have the same scaling problems as raster fonts, however they do have other issues of their own.

  • These scaling problems does not occur with outline fonts.
An additional problem with raster fonts (and vector fonts) is that they generally scale all aspects each glyph equally, which can make things look out of proportion at larger text sizes. Again, this problem is solved by outline fonts.



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