Bitmapped font: A font which has characters formed as a series of on and off bits, which correspond to the dark and light areas of the character. Bitmapped fonts are fixed resolution and fixed size: it is necessary to use fonts that match the printer's resolution for printing and separate fonts that match the display resolution for screen previewing.
Device space: In the PostScript language, the representation of a physical display device. The PostScript graphics software transforms the user's input (in PostScript language instructions) from the device-independent PostScript image to a specific physical display, which may have its own resolution, geometry and color characteristics.
Dictionary: In PostScript, a table of system- and user-defined commands that are available to a running program. Analogous in function to a C library, but is dynamically extensible at run time.
dvi: Output file produced by TeX or some other processor.
dvips: A program which takes a DVI file produced by TeX and converts it to PostScript, normally sending the result directly to a laser printer.
Encapsulated PostScript (EPS): An extension of PostScript which provides device independence by enclosing the image with a header and footer that defines the graphics state of the creator application. Software that decodes a EPS image can translate the image to the output characteristics of a different device. EPS images are limited to a single page.
Font encoding: The correspondence of a font's characters to their ASCII code. Different font encodings are commonly used to define national character sets and special-purpose character sets like Symbol fonts.
LaTeX: Text formatting language
Ligature: In typography, pairs of letters which are treated as one character for esthetic reasons. Common ligatures include ff, fl and fi.
PostScript: Industry-standard page description language invented by Adobe Systems, Inc., which allows text and graphics images to be displayed by any device that understands the language, regardless of the device's resolution, geometry and color characteristics.
Scalable font: A font which uses computer instructions to define each character shape. Unlike bitmapped fonts, the characters of a scalable font can be rendered at any size and resolution.
\special: Commands embedded in TeX or LaTeX files.
teTeX: Thomas Esser's implementation of TeX for Linux systems.
TeX: Text formatter developed by Donald E. Knuth. Similar to the nroff and troff formatting programs.
xdvi: DVI previewer for the X Window System
