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Back to the Forum Archives In a recent essay, I promised a discussion of fonts and files with respect to the relationship between font size and file length. I try to always keep my commitments and this essay will satisfy me that I did exactly that. This discussion became necessary because I said font size has no effect on file size. That sounds rather bizarre, but it is nonetheless true. It comes out that way because of how the files are stored. I currently use WordPerfect, but it would not matter. WordPerfect and all other word processors use what are called control characters to determine how the information is presented and also how it is stored. While different programs will use different control characters, the effect is the same. Before we go on, a disclaimer is necessary. What you see on your screen may not be the same as what I see on my screen. I cannot count on your computer to have the fonts I use, so on the web pages I use a default font. That ensures you will be able to read the page even if you do not have my set of fonts. Now, let us make sure we agree on what a font is. A font is simply what we call a typeface. A typeface is the style of type, how it looks when you read it. For example Pica and Elite are font styles. In the old days of the typewriter, that was about it. You decided the typeface when you bought the typewriter and there were only two choices and each came in only one size. With the advent of computers, all that has changed. Most of us are confronted with more fonts (type styles) than we can cope with. To confirm this just launch your word processor, find your fonts list, and look at the choices. The interesting thing about fonts, besides the plethora of choices, is the way fonts are defined on the computer. Whether we use Adobe type 1, True Type, or the new Open Type fonts, they are all defined in the same way. We do not store the actual font as we see it. We store an outline definition of the font. As a result all characters require the same amount of storage space regardless of their size. That is the key we don't really store characters the way we see them presented. we store descriptions of characters called font outlines. Without getting unnecessarily complicated it means the description for a large typeface takes no more storage space than the description for a small typeface. For an example, take a look at this page as it now stands. I used Microsoft Notepad to look at this file and here is a part of what I got. ÿWPCO 2# Í'Ñ;M é÷œXC£Ý먰z~r°" ¾ÿ$Ìú¬èfvi­O ㈥ÐIqšêUm Yñ ™^Þ"ð¸:*s j²&"@" E LJcŠ6YDÒŽ $;fDÄ\2Br‘_ºN·šÎågüß
wÛå ÁZî³Ú•ÙÈáÃ7·˜ìMÉS
þªp £`‚‹ &áœqúÁ
z"w`&hibar;ŒßIßuýGƒ›Ÿä&hibar;
óLþåþ­÷ýÎQðÁ_û k› ÔCÏûÕìB ²»VS¿ ^ ÊcQ—y¿ÀUö|9Ñ ñâƒâ »ðæä­Þ,ë°í8¿£˜ ç-]q?÷w5a'O Ý´ ¤BÌ‹sUÎ÷¾;€mâ\ suˆéûÚoëðˆ Ñø\ÚOLÃg+qŽƒcwËA‚ÐàúŽ
<¾çÑ"7Ü° vŠÊ|ϤM
*å D¹ •ÔUŒ H+?>ÐØ"½DŽ&SHY;b¨¨³Š b
"Oh swell," you say. What you should say, is thank God I don't have to deal with that. This might just give you a clue into the minds of computer programmers and why so many of them seem to be insane. I am not even going to try to interpret that for you. Instead I will use the Reveal Codes feature of WordPerfect and copy some of it for you. You could do this same thing on your word processor. Reveal codes does not show us exactly what the control characters look like. It shows us what they do or mean. With that in mind we can take a look at the formatting for the first four lines of this document as reveal codes shows it.
Open style: DocumentStyle;[Font: Bookman][Font Size 11 pt][Font
Bookman][Font Size 11pt][Lang] Fonts and Files: [Hrt]
Notice that the text of the first four lines is still there, but it is marked out by the codes that control how it will appear. Now this is the key to understanding. Each character that I type, regardless of type size, will take one and only one byte of storage. The Open Style and Document Style tell us that I defined this type style in the default definitions of my word processor. That means, whenever I create a new document, it will have the typeface called Bookman with a size of 11 points. So every character I type will show up on the page as 11 point Bookman, but each character will be stored in one single byte. If I should change the typeface in the middle of a document, the only thing that would change is the description of the font. For example, I specified Esprit Book, 11 point, bold in this paragraph. In reveal codes it would look like this.
[Bold [Font Esprit Book If I should change the typeface in
the middle of a document, the only thing that would[SRt]
So, we can have any typeface we want and it will not change
the size of the file. It will only control how the document appears
to us, either on the copmputer screen or on the printed Page.
Ain't science swell?
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