There are several kinds of PCL fonts. Among them the most widely used ones are the bitmapped format and the scalable true type format. The former type usually has a file extension SFP, which stands for Soft Font Portrait. It is so named because there is another type called SFL (Soft Font Landscape) due to the fact that early HP LaerJet printers were unable to rotate font characters. The SFP and SFL formats are identical, except the orientation parameter. A bitmapped font, like a bitmap image, consists of an array of pixel values, instead of drawing commands. As a result, bitmapped fonts only produce fixed size characters which can not be scaled. For example, a font designed to print barcodes at 0.5" height won't produce barcodes at 1.0". You need to ask the font designer to create another font to produce a different size barcode.

Scalable True Type font (SFT), on the contrary, is just like a true type font on Windows or Mac systems. They contains drawing commands instead. As such they can be scaled to any size. You only need one font in the printer to produce barcodes of multiple sizes.

The fonts included in this package are PCL scalable fonts.