FONT COMPRESSION AND DECOMPRESSION FOR CHARACTER GENERATION

In a technique for storing data representative of characters and symbols of a font in a compacted manner, interstitial bank spaces between characters are removed. The proper symbol is addressed during decompression by combining a calculated approximate pointer with a limited range correction factor stored with the font to obtain an exact start of symbol pointer utilized to address the image data for the symbol. Also stored with the correction factor is data indicating the vertical positioning of the symbol within the character box.