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Linked Fonts
Font linking allows developers to remove data redundancy and more flexibly manage the font memory footprint of consumer electronic devices. Through font linking, a grouping of fonts can be treated as a single font, without having to merge multiple font files. For example, to provide Chinese mobile phone users access to bold and non-bold Latin-based characters, developers would previously need to duplicate both the Latin and Chinese character sets. Through font linking, just one implementation of the Chinese character set is required, linking to both the non-bold and bold Latin fonts. In addition, when rendering Chinese characters that are linked to the bold Latin characters, pseudo-emboldening effects will be applied automatically to generate high-quality Chinese bold characters. Other features of font linking include the ability to append additional characters or symbols to the linked font, such as colored icons or emoticons – without altering the original component fonts.
The linking process is performed with an offline tool. Upon completion, the resulting linked font appears as a single file to the font engine and is delivered to the customer. A subset of these font linking capabilities are now provided directly through the iType font engine, starting with version 4.0. This allows for the dynamic linking of fonts on devices without the use of an offline utility.
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