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That’s what the iType® font engine offers – even for languages with complex scripts and on devices with small memory size, small screens and low-resolution displays.
Based on the TrueType® and OpenType® font formats, the iType font engine is a scalable font rendering subsystem that brings the benefits of scalable type and high-quality multilingual font display to the embedded environment. The latest release, iType 4.0 offers enhanced flexibility and configurability. The iType font engine can be easily implemented from various platforms using iType® Connects™ plug-ins, further simplifying the transition from bitmap to scalable fonts and reducing time to market for OEMs.
The iType font engine is ideal for:
• Mobile Phones
• Television set-top boxes
• Interactive TVs
• Console displays
• Portable media players
• Camcorders
...Or almost any resource
constrained device
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To achieve these benefits:
• Easy-to-read text, even at small sizes
• Properly composed text in the user’s language
• Aesthetically appealing typefaces that
complement on-screen graphics
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Packaged as ANSI C code for broad, flexible integration, the iType font engine meets stringent size requirements for any applications and devices, including those that support East Asian languages requiring thousands of characters. Scalable outline or stroke characters are dynamically rendered as bitmaps (single bit) or graymaps (2, 4 or 8 bit), outlines or strokes to the specific size that the application has requested. The font engine scales the outlines or strokes and then fills them in to render the character to the specific size the application has requested. Hinting instructions, if present within the outline or stroke font, are also rendered to optimize characters at specific sizes to ensure crisp on-screen viewing.
High performance architecture
Optimized for both space efficiency and speed, the iType subsystem lets you tune the engine’s already small footprint even smaller by selecting at build time only the resources you need. Performance features such as multithreading and high-speed character caching remove process bottlenecks and ensure that requested characters get generated and returned to applications when needed.
Patented font compression/decompression software saves significant memory for font data storage. These algorithms allow portions of font data to be decompressed as needed at run-time – so users receive space-saving benefits without paying performance penalties. Font compression can also be applied when downloading fonts between connected devices, reducing needed bandwidth and transmitted data size.
Font support
In addition to TrueType and OpenType-based multilingual typefaces and East Asian Font Sets, Monotype Imaging offers a line-up of ESQ® Mobile fonts tailored for mobile phones and other display screens. ESQ Mobile fonts combined with the iType font engine enable various Monotype Imaging innovations, such as Fonts in a Box™ technology, which ensures the full display of characters within limited screen real estate. East Asian varieties of ESQ Mobile fonts also support Monotype Imaging’s patent-pending SmartHint™ technology.
For some low-end applications, however, bitmaps may be preferred. For those applications, Monotype Imaging offers a utility that converts scalable data to bitmaps. The fonts would appear the same as their scalable counterparts – creating a consistent font style across the product range. Bitmaps that have been converted from scalable type are also able to take advantage of innovations such as Fonts in a Box and SmartHint technologies. In addition, Monotype Imaging offers custom design services for scalable and bitmap fonts.
Integration with Monotype Imaging’s WorldType Layout Engine
The WorldType® Layout Engine handles a wide range of writing systems in one very small package. The technology works with the iType font engine to ease the ability to internationalize products with which users need to interact in their native languages.
For a firsthand look at the capabilities of the iType scalable font engine, try Monotype Imaging's Font Technology Demo. See how the iType font renderer interacts with the WorldType Layout Engine and a catalog of multilingual fonts to display high-quality text.
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