First of all, we should know that not all fonts are downloadable online for free. Some free fonts such as OCR-A or OCR-B are not proper for printing receipts, although we think they are similar.

In many cases, receipt fonts are not those that can be invoked from computer disk, such as tahoma, verdana or arial, but from printer chips where the binary font data for printing receipts are embedded. These printers can be of dot-matrix or thermal.

These embedded fonts are varied by printers, but all of them have three same traits below:

1, They can’t be invoked by any application, because they are embedded in printer chips.

2, All of them are dot matrix fonts, but not vector ones. Printer chips use only pixel bitmap data to generate typeface on receipts for their poor computing capacity. On the contrary, vector fonts are too complicated to be used in printer chips. For dot matrix printer, the dotts of fonts are dispersive what we can see easily, but for thermal printer the dotts become joint lines or squares what we can’t tell dotts apart easily. Nevertheless, all receipts fonts printed out by ESC/POS command are of dot-matrix actually.

3, For the same reasons above, embedded fonts in invoice printers must be monospaced bitmap fonts because those non-inkjet printers haven’t enough computing capacity to embed the proportional fonts.

If you are looking for some special receipt fonts that you can hardly find out, the embedded dot matrix fonts will be what you want, no doubt.