Software vs. Hardware Fonts: How to Choose

Software characters are of medium quality, suitable for most uses. The appearance of hardware-generated characters varies from mediocre (such as the characters found in some window systems) to publication quality (for example, PostScript and Windows True Type fonts).

Software and some hardware characters go through the same 3D transformations as the rest of the plot, yielding a better looking plot. Hardware font drivers that support 3D transformations include X Windows, WIN32 (on Windows platforms only), PostScript, and WMF.

Both hardware and software fonts can be rotated. For example, use the Orientation keyword with the XYOUTS procedure to rotate a text string.

Clipping does not work when hardware fonts are selected. If you intend to use the Clip keyword to clip your graphics output, you must use software fonts.

The appearance and availability of hardware fonts varies greatly from device to device, and thus are not as portable as software fonts.

In general, the software fonts work the same way on any graphics device and look the same, within the limitations of device resolution. Thus, it is possible to produce graphics on one device and send it to another without worrying about character output. Note, however, that software fonts are scaled relative to the size of the active hardware font. Changing the size of the hardware font will rescale the size of the software font.

note

You may notice that under X Windows the size of the software fonts varies from device to device. When you start PV‑WAVE, the hardware font is set to the current hardware font of the X server. Not all X servers will have the same default font size because users can reconfigure the default font and the default font can differ between X servers. Therefore, you may discover that the hardware font size, and therefore the software font size, may vary across different workstations. You can avoid this by explicitly setting the X font using the DEVICE procedure. For example:

DEVICE, font='-adobe-courier-medium-r-normal--14-*'

It takes more computer time to draw characters with line vectors (software fonts), and generally results in more input/output. This is not an important issue, however, unless the plot contains a large number of characters or the transmission link to the device is slow.

“Local” fonts refer to fonts that contain characters that are required for a specific language. For example, a font designed for French text contains characters that are not found in an English text font.

The PV‑WAVE software fonts contain a limited set of localized characters. If you require characters outside this set (French characters, for example), then you must use a suitable hardware font.