What is the Adobe Type Manager?
While PostScript printers have built-in outline fonts, the computer screen for MS-Windows or Macintosh computers also need a representation of the fonts in use, but screen resolution is much less than the 300 dpi or 600 dpi of the printer. In fact, the standard screen resolution is 72 dpi. These graphical interfaces usually use a “bitmap” font for character display. A bitmap font is a pattern of dots that closely resembles a character shape in a given typeface, point size, rotation, and resolution. Bitmapped characters cannot be scaled without appearing jagged. Outline fonts can create a different bitmap for size needed and thus appear much smoother. Bitmaps also require considerable storage space. Thus there is usually one bitmap font for each point size of the desired typeface, i.e., Times Roman at 10 point, Times Roman at 12 point, etc. This turns out to be a lot of bitmap font files and thus a lot of disk space to store all the sizes and variety of typefaces.
