Fonts - Scaled Fonts
Embedded apps are often running with low resolution screens that can not show the subtleties of intricate characters.
Embedded apps often know in advance exactly what size fonts will be required.
Font foundries will provide fonts in formats such as PostScript or TrueType - but that does not necessarily mean that you will have a rendering engine for that font available on your platform.
Notes:
If the display on the embedded system is not a high resolution display then many of the subtleties that may have been designed into a character, when describing it using infinite resolution curves.
It may not be possible to do slight adjustments of the spacing between characters, because the size of a single pixel limits the smallest movement of a character.
Even if a scaled font can provide you with exactly the characters you want, can you afford the processing power of generating these fonts at runtime.
If you do get a professional font foundry to design a font to fit your requirements, then also bear in mind that they will probably provide that font in TrueType or PostScript format, but they will not provide you with the means to render that font, because most of their customers simply install the font on a desktop computer.
So, if scaled fonts are overkill for a lot of our embedded products, what is the poor mans alternative….