How many people who use programs like MS Word realise that the text characters are held as Vector graphics?
The advantage for storing characters is that a single file defining all characters, in a font can be enlargered or shunk to the desired size
You’ll only require, for each font a normal, italic, bold and body italic version is required for each font, instead of having to have 4 files for every character font, if the fonts were stored as bitmapped format.