MicroType Express

Monotype Imaging’s patented MicroType® Express font compression technology for fonts is used within embedded applications. The technology minimizes memory usage for font data storage in resource-constrained environments, where both ROM and RAM savings are critical. Small font files are built without sacrificing the qualities, features and capabilities of OpenType® and TrueType® fonts.

The MicroType Express font compression technology has been included in the MPEG-4 specification, outlined in the ISO/IEC document 14496-18, “Font Compression and Streaming”.

The compressed font format provides random access capabilities into the font data and allows the font rasterizer to render glyphs directly from the compressed font tables without decompressing the whole font, while maintaining the highest character quality. The selection and number of compressed tables in a font file may differ from one font to another. Any number of tables can be compressed in the same font (from only one to all) which allows font application developers to optimize the “memory savings to performance of font rendering engine” tradeoff.

Compression algorithms, applied to font tables, take advantage of the advanced knowledge of OpenType font table structures. Separation of these objects into groups with distinctly different statistical distributions allows developers to employ a number of compression techniques which result in the most compact lossless-compressed data. These techniques are especially effective when compressing of the glyph data (‘glyf’ table).