Deadbinkies is a typeface designed for the X Window System, or X11, used on Unix-like operating systems.
When it comes to computer fonts, they are electronic data files containing glyphs, characters, or symbols such as dingbats. While fonts used to refer to interchangeable typefaces using mechanical components, most modern fonts are used in computing. There are three main types of computer font file formats: bitmap fonts, outline fonts, and stroke fonts.
Bitmap fonts are made up of a series of dots or pixels representing the image of each glyph in each face and size. They are faster and easier to use in computer code but require a separate font for each size and each face. Outline fonts use Bézier curves, drawing instructions, and mathematical formulas to describe each glyph, making the character outlines scalable to any size. Stroke fonts use specified lines and additional information to define the profile or size and shape of the line in a specific face and size to describe the appearance of the glyph.
While outline and stroke fonts can be resized with a single font, they require additional computer code to render them, making them somewhat more complicated to use than bitmap fonts. For example, the letter "A" has three components, the two lines on the outside and the bar between the two outside lines, and may have more if the design has serifs.
This contrast between bitmap fonts and outline fonts can be compared to the difference between the two main types of image file formats. Bitmap image formats, such as Windows Bitmap (.bmp), Portable Network Graphics (.png), and Tagged Image Format (.tif or .tiff), store the image data as a grid of pixels, in some cases with compression. Outline or stroke image formats, such as Windows Metafile format (.wmf) and Scalable Vector Graphics format (.svg), store instructions of how to draw the image, rather than storing the image itself.
Bitmap images can be displayed in different sizes only with some distortion but render quickly, whereas outline or stroke image formats are resizable, but take longer to render as pixels must be drawn from scratch each time they are displayed. Fonts are designed and created using font editors, with fonts designed specifically for the computer screen and not printing being known as screenfonts.