OS X provides full support for all types of PostScript-based fonts. CID stands for 'Character Identifier,' which refers to the numbers that are used to index and access the characters in the font. Chinese Postscript fonts use the CID format, which uses Type 1 character descriptions tailored especially for East Asian writing systems. The most common PostScript font format is Type 1. It supports both graphics and text, with built-in support for fonts. If you want to learn more about font formats and printing technologies, Ken Lunde's CJKV Information Processing is very thorough on these topics.ĭeveloped by Adobe, PostScript is a 'page-description' language for printers.
The information provided here is limited to what the typical Chinese Mac user might want to know. They are fully scalable: to print or display a character, the outline is scaled to the desired size, then rendered by filling the outline with bits or pixels. Outline fonts are fonts in which glyphs are described mathematically as 'outlines,' a series of line segments, arcs, and curves. The characters defined by the encodings inside your computer are abstract, whereas the glyphs defined by a font are concrete visual forms that can be rendered on screen or paper.
