Asian Fonts and Other Large Font Sets
Asian Fonts and Other Large Font Sets

Asian Fonts and Other Large Font Sets

Both of the printer’s programming languages, ZPL and EPL, support the large pictographic double-byte character Asian font sets. The ZPL programming language supports Unicode.
Asian language ideographic and pictographic fonts have large character sets with thousands of characters that support single language code page. To support for these large character sets, printer manufacturers adopted a double-byte (67840 maximum) character system (instead of the single-byte, 256-maximum character system used by Latin-based language characters to address this issue).
With the invention of Unicode came the ability to support multiple languages using a single font set. A Unicode font supports one or more code points (relate these to code page character maps) accessed in a standard method that resolves character mapping conflicts.
The number of fonts that can be downloaded to your printer is dependent upon the amount of available Flash memory not already in use and the size of the font to be downloaded.
Some Unicode fonts are large-sized. These include MS (Microsoft) Arial Unicode font (23 MB) available from Microsoft and the Andale font (22 MB) offered by Zebra. These large font sets typically support a large number of languages.

Procuring and Installing Asian Fonts

Asian bitmap font sets are typically downloaded into the printer either by the printer user or an integrator.
ZPL fonts are purchased separately from the printer.
The following EPL Asian Fonts are available as free downloads from zebra.com:
  • Simplified and Traditional Chinese (The SimSun scalable Simplified Chinese font is pre-loaded onto printers sold with a Chinese power cord.)
  • Japanese—JIS and Shift-JIS mappings
  • Korean including Johab
  • Thai