# Font Files

An OCRMaxFont file is a collection of character data used during classification to identify each element of a segmented character string. For each OCRMax tool in your application, you must either load a font file from memory or create one from scratch. A font file contains the following information about each character it defines:

- An image of the character
- A normalized image of the character that increases the contrast between the character and the background
- A binarized image of the character with only black and white pixels representing the character against the background
- The UTF-32 character code and name for this character

- The cell rectangle and mark rectangle for each character.

  The mark rectangle specifies the physical extents of a character while the cell rectangle provides information about the position of the mark rectangle with respect to the line along the base of the character string. The following figure shows an example of both rectangles:

  See the topic Choosing Segmentation Parameters for information on how the mark rectangle and cell rectangle are used during classification.

A font file supports the following types of fonts:

- Stroke fonts

- Dot-matrix fonts

- Outline fonts

- Fixed-width fonts

- Proportional fonts

A font file does not support the following types of fonts:

- Where two or more characters are stacked on top of each other:

- Where separate characters come in contact with each other and the character width varies:

- Chinese, Korean, and Japanese characters

- Windows font files, or any font file created outside of an OCRMax tool

See the topic Using the OCRMax Tool for an example of creating a font file through a collection of sample images. A font file can be saved for use with any number of OCRMax tools that will analyze images containing character strings with a similar appearance.