Printer Fonts

The ZPL programming language provides advanced font mapping and scaling technology to support outline fonts (TrueType or OpenType) and Unicode character mapping as well as basic bitmapped fonts and character code pages.

The printer’s font capabilities are programming language-dependent. The ZPL and the legacy EPL programming guides describe and document the fonts, code pages, character access, listing fonts, and limitations for their respective printer programming languages. See the printer programming guides for information on Text, Fonts, and Character support.

Zebra has a variety of utilities and application software that support font download to the printer for ZPL and EPL printer programming languages.

Fonts and memory are shared by the programming languages in the printer. Fonts can be loaded into various storage locations in the printer. ZPL programming can recognize EPL and ZPL fonts. EPL programming can only recognize EPL fonts. See the respective programmer guides for more information on fonts and printer memory.

The printer supports two sets of language, region, and character sets for permanent fonts loaded into the printer for each printer programming language; ZPL and EPL. The printer supports localization with common international character map code pages.

For ZPL code page support, including Unicode, see the

^CI

command in the ZPL programmer’s guide.

Asian language ideographic and pictographic fonts have large character sets with thousands of characters that support a single language code page. In order to support the large Asian character sets, the industry adopted a double-byte (67840 maximum) character system instead of the single-byte characters (256 maximum) used by Latin-based language characters to address large font sets. In order to address multiple languages with a single font set, Unicode was invented. A Unicode font supports one or more code points (relate these to code page character maps) and is accessed in a standard method that resolves character mapping conflicts. The ZPL programming language supports Unicode. Both of the printer’s programming languages support the large pictographic double-byte character Asian font sets.

The number of fonts that can be downloaded 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, such as MS (Microsoft) Arial Unicode font (23 MB) available from Microsoft or the Andale font (22 MB) offered by Zebra. These large font sets typically support a large number of languages as well.

Asian bitmap font sets are downloaded into the printer by the user or integrator. The ZPL fonts are purchased separately from the printer. EPL Asian Fonts are available for free to download from the Zebra Web site.