The difference between screen fonts and printer fonts
Fonts designed for print, are drawn (i.e. onto paper by a printer) on-the-fly from geometric descriptions of their outlines, and are thus scalable to any size. The first generation of fonts designed in this way didn't look good on low resolution monitors because there were not enough pixels available to display the subtlety and style inherent within the font descriptions.
An Apple Mac has a default resolution of 72dpi (dots per inch), and a Windows PC a default resolution of 96dpi, whereas printed material is likely to have a resolution of 1200dpi and upwards.
In an effort to try to overcome the problem, pioneering web font designers such as Chuck Bigelow (who designed the early screen font Pellucida as a screen equivalent of Lucida), developed a number of 'bitmapped' screen fonts.
Bitmapped fonts were designed in harmony with the square pixel grid of low resolution screens; in a bitmapped font, every character is represented by a particular arrangement of pixels on the screen and has been carefully tweaked by a designer for optimal readability and clearness.
Apple were quick to take advantage of bitmapped fonts to increase the readability of on-screen text. Looking back at our earlier list of included fonts for the Mac, you can tell which fonts are the bitmap screen fonts because they mostly have city names, e.g. Geneva (for Helvetica), New York (for Times) , Monaco (for Courier).
On MS Window bitmapped fonts can be recognised by their distinctive red and white icons found in the Windows/Fonts folder. Bitmapped fonts in MS Windows tend to be used for file and folder icon and windows labels.
However, one problem with bitmap fonts was that they where available in a limited number of sizes. If you chose a size that was not installed, 'you would get an attack of the on screen jaggies', i.e. the characters would look very roughtly drawn, and be difficult to read.
This was because the computer would try to create the characters based on what it knew about the shape of the font, or based on the outline printer version installed on a connected printer. Unfortunatly, most of the time it did not make a good job of drawing the characters on the screen.
In the past, scalable fonts didn't look good on screen, but similarly, bitmapped fonts didn't look good when printed (a 72dpi bitmap font would prints out at 72dpi, even on a high resolution printer). Commonly - your nerdy typographically aware computer user - would write in a screen font, but convert to a printer font before printing.
It is beyond the scope of this chapter to give you the full 'then and now' story of how things have changed (a useful summary can be found at: http://www.dotprint.com/graphics/graphi26.htm), but it is safe to say that these days very few people designing for the Web - would know the difference between a screen font, a printer font, and a hole in the wall.
Many of the fonts commonly used on the Web today actually look good on the screen, come in every size, and don't look too shabby when printed. That is because the trend is now towards designing outline fonts (i.e. geometrically defined fonts) that have been designed with the constraints of low resolution monitors in mind.
Microsoft helped improve the readability of text on the web when they commissioned Matthew Carter to design fonts that worked well specifically on low resolution screens - and thus worked well on the web.
Matthew Carter, designer of the much used Verdana and Georgia, has this to say about screen fonts:
"In graphic design circles, people think of screen fonts as preview mode -- it's only when the toner hits the wood-pulp that we usually judge a typeface".
"But that's an increasingly short-sighted view of life. Larger numbers of computer users spend their entire time in front of a screen and never (or seldom) print anything. So it became obvious to us that this was a reversal of priorities -- we should not approach this as doing printer fonts adapted for the screen, we should design them as screen fonts from the outset. The printer fonts are secondary in this case." Matthew Carter, Designer of Verdana and Georgia.
http://www.webreview.com/1997/11_07/webauthors/11_07_97_10.shtml
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