Printer Text Fonts Do Not Look the Same as in Windows

Topic or Information

The Printer text fonts not looking exactly the same as within your Windows application

Applies To

Zebra Kiosk Printers

Details

Windows is using something called Kerning pairs to adjust the distance between all the characters

What is kerning? 
All character has a kerning pair which means all characters in a font has a specific kerning value for each combination of letters.

Why using kerning pairs?
To make a text more easy and relaxing to read all the kerning pairs are weighted to give a pleasant look for the eye. The disadvantage with kerning pairs is the huge kerning pair table that has to follow the font (255*255 = 65535 pairs).

Kiosk Printers
The Zebra Kiosk printers first of all do not support kerning pairs in its font specification. The second issue is the limited memory for fonts and logotypes. When the Zebra printer standard fonts are generated, the kerning information is discarded.

The effect of this will be that the letters will not be placed exactly in the same way the originally font does. Instead all character cells are aligned to each other.

This will result in a denser or spread text depending on how the original kerning pair is adjusting the character cells. Either Windows or the printer knows which characters are printable or not. This is why the space character also is affected by the loss of kerning pairs.