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Serif fonts have small "wings" (Fr. Serif) at the ends of lines forming the characters. A standard serif font is Times New Roman, famous for its use with newspapers.
Times New Roman
The Times New Roman font. Notice the wings (serifs) on the characters.
Sans-serif (Fr. Without wings) have no small "wings." A common sans-serif font is called Helvetica (Swiss). This font is copyrighted and trademarked so close variations are commonly used. Helvetica is commonly used for newspaper headlines. Microsoft uses a variation called Arial.
Arial
Microsoft's Arial font, with no serifs
The characters of mono-spaced fonts have equal width. A common mono-spaced font is Courier, famous for its use with most typewriters.
Courier
The courier (typewriter) font has characters of equal width.
Most fonts are proportionally spaced. The letters are of different widths and spaced to match. Arial and Times New Roman are proportionally spaced fonts.
Raster fonts are defined by a bitmap that visually represents each character using dot-addressable graphics (the same as screen characters in text mode video).
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If you try to double the character's size, the blocks that make up the character double in size, too. They don't scale well.
Vector fonts use vector graphics. Most vector fonts are also outline fonts. A simple vector font consists of skinny lines where outline fonts define the outline of each character, filling in the space inside.
Microsoft uses its brand of outline fonts called TrueType. Like other vector and outline fonts, TrueType is defined by a table that mathematically defines lines and curves that make each character. Multiply the numbers in the definition by two, and the font is twice the size. They don't suffer from the distortion that raster fonts do when scaled.
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Before TrueType and similar vector/outline fonts, you needed a font loaded in the computer and a separate matching font loaded in the printer to print exactly what you saw on the screen. Characters were sent to the printer as ASCII codes. Font changes were sent separately from the characters. Vector fonts are sent to the printer as graphics and printed as pictures. Therefore, the printed result is identical to what is on the screen.
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