Font encoding is a method of defining and printing characters that are not part of the standard ASCII character set. You can think of it as a translation service whereby the printer reads a character from the tables or table of contents, looks it up in a translation table and prints the corresponding translation character.

Quantum comes with one encoding scheme already set up, which allows you to print characters from the Microsoft Multilingual (Latin 1) character set (in Windows, this is known as code page 850), but you can define other translations if you want.

Each font encoding scheme is held in a separate file in the QTHOME include directory. The files are called name.fen, where name is any name you choose (it is sensible to choose a name that reflects the name of the character set or code page). The name of the Microsoft Multilingual encoding file is cp850.fen.