Why do printers have resident fonts, and how do I use them?

Question

Many printers specify that they have resident fonts--often dozens of them. I could understand why this was necessary years ago, when perhaps the choice was to use a resident font or to print the whole page in raster form (assuming even that was possible.) But now, from what I can tell, PCL and PostScript both support downloading fonts from the PC to the printer. Why have resident fonts? Is there any practical advantage to them? And, if there is a reason to use them, how would I use them? For instance how could a MS Word user use the resident font, or how could I as a Linux user use them with roff, LaTeX, or something simpler like a2ps?

Answer 1

I have an older Postscript laser printer with resident fonts and they were typically provided that way for several reasons, among them:

1) Resident fonts were stored in ROM and didn't take up (afaik) the printer's memory during printing. This could make the difference between printing and not printing on a complex document that used up a lot of the printer's [limited] RAM.

2) On a slower connection (parallel or serial), a print job would print faster if it didn't have to send the fonts to the printer instead of just the raw Postscript / PCL data.

Typically if the document fonts have the same name as the printer font name, they will be substituted. You may have to create a mapping for this. In e.g., a2ps, you can set them in the prologue file: a2ps documentation