: Why Outline fonts are rasterized before using on screen? I am new in Typography and now a days reading about fonts, rasterizer like FreeType etc. What i get till now is that fonts are mainly

@Steve758

Almost all output devices, with very few exceptions, are raster devices. A monitor is one; it uses pixels to display text and everything else. So a font must be displayed in raster form. The program or part of the operating system that handles that can vary, depending on the OS and application program.

Old toner-based printers and dot-matrix printers worked by having several sizes of bitmapped fonts in memory or downloaded. But even those old devices could print images, and a font rasterizer on the computer could have been used to work with outline fonts.

Postscript was one of the first languages to scale vector fonts to any size. But in the end, they all get rasterized. The only type of printer that produces shapes directly from mathematical formulas (vectors) is an old-style plotter.

The NEXT computer system used Display Postscript to drive its monitor, but still a postscript interpreter had to produce raster output for the monitor; it's just that the display engine accepted Postscript input.

These days it's usually not necessary to focus on font technology and whether or where it gets rasterized. But I do applaud you for trying to learn. Too many people don't know the why and how, and they get into trouble when they submit files to printers or design web pages and emails that won't display correctly on every device.

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