The original printed font is the font used in engraving. Block printing is a printing method invented by China. First stick the written words on the board, and then carve them into reflective lettering, that is, the printing plate. Therefore, the lettering in block printing is handwritten regular script. Later, in the Song Dynasty, the number and variety of printing increased greatly, and full-time writers appeared. They cooperated with the engraver to design a beautiful and easy-to-engrave font, which was the original Song Dynasty. During the Northern Song Dynasty and the Qing Dynasty, Bi Sheng invented movable type printing. He used clay to make movable type into sheets. After that, wooden movable type and copper movable type appeared. These fonts are limited to "regular script" and "Song style", and the font size is fixed to one size. As for die casting metal fonts, it is said that they were developed by European missionaries who spread to Shanghai through Macao in the18th century.

There are many characters in Chinese, so it is very laborious to design a set of fonts. In addition, the work of making fonts and casting characters is heavy, so the number of movable type fonts is limited. In the 1940s, there were only four types of movable type fonts: (1) old song style (2) imitation song style (3) bold type (4) Chinese block letters. By the 1950s, the number of new beauty institutions had increased. The font size is in numbers. A set of standard Song typefaces is configured in three series: (1) Chu, No.2, No.5, No.7 (2), 1 No.4 (3), No.3 and No.6. On the basis of 9000 characters, the number of fonts to be configured in a set of characters will reach more than 80,000. Therefore, casting movable type is an arduous task.

These three series have their own basic uses. For the printing company, it does not need to configure all three series. The commonly used font size for the text of books is number five, number six for newspapers and number four for textbooks (14). Therefore, according to the nature of the work, you can choose different configurations.

The strokes of the same group of characters need to be consistent, regardless of their size. If a certain font size is taken as the standard, it will be enlarged or reduced to other font sizes, which has certain limitations. When it is excessive, the proportion of strokes will be uncoordinated. So zoom in to a certain extent, some strokes of words with many strokes should be bold, narrowed to a certain extent, and some strokes should be reduced. These processes increase the difficulty of making font.

In phototypesetting, an optical lens can be used to enlarge or reduce a set of standard negative fonts, resulting in different sizes. However, it also has a limit. When it is too large or too fine, the proportion of coarse and fine words seems to be out of harmony. Therefore, there are usually two or three negative fonts with different sizes as standards, which are enlarged and reduced in different ranges. Digital fonts are composed of dense dot matrix. Every point is a pixel, because there are many pixels, so it is much easier to modify the strokes when the font is enlarged and reduced.