The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Oct. 19, 1999
Filed:
Mar. 24, 1998
Michael A Beadman, Steeple Morden, Royston, GB;
Paul Martin, Great Shelford, GB;
Esselte N.V., St. Niklaas, BE;
Abstract
A label printing apparatus having an input device for determining a predetermined label length and selecting one or more of plurality of characters for composing a label having one or more lines of characters in the length; a memory for storing font data defining the plurality of characters; a display for displaying the characters selected at the input device; a printer for printing the selected characters on an image receiving tape to produce a label; and a controller operable to determine an appropriate character size such that the number of characters selected by a user can be accommodated on the predetermined length of tape, wherein the controller is operable to apply a scaling factor to the font data according to the appropriate character size to optimize the size of the characters within the predetermined label length. Also a method of formatting a variable length character string to fit within a region of fixed dimension, by retrieving a string of characters from an input device; determining the length of a region of fixed dimension; determining an appropriate character size such that the number of characters can be accommodated with the region of fixed dimension; and optimizing the sizes of the characters within the region of fixed dimension so that said characters of the character string may be placed within the region of fixed dimension.