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The iType® font engine is a font rendering subsystem that brings the benefits of
scalable type and high-quality multilingual font display to the embedded
environment. iType offers a host of advanced
capabilities including font linking,
font management and discovery, support for
various industry standards and font formats, and Edge™
Technology, which enables the display of stylistic East Asian text in a
small memory footprint. iType can be implemented into various platforms using
iType Connects™ plug-ins, helping to reduce time-to-market for OEMs.
The iType font engine is ideal for:
• Smartphones and feature phones
• Television set-top boxes
• Interactive TVs
• Navigation devices
• Portable media players
• Game devices
• Digital cameras and camcorders
• Console displays
...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
• Support for industry standards and specifications for font downloading
and text display
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Based on OpenType®, TrueType® and PostScript® font formats and packaged as ANSI
C code for broad, flexible integration, iType meets stringent size requirements
for any applications and eInk or LCD devices, including those that support East
Asian languages requiring thousands of characters.
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.
Edge Technology and Edge360
As an optional plug-in for the iType font engine, Edge
Technology provides high-quality text rendering and tunability, with
additional features catered to the unique requirements of East Asian writing
systemsThrough an advanced hinting technique, Edge Technology produces highly
legible East Asian characters. It also delivers the ability fine tune the
anti-aliasing on the rendered text to optimize for screen characteristics or to
harmonize the appearance between different language modules. Bring a whole new
dimension to text with Edge360™ technology, an
embedded solution for delivering crisp, dynamic text in hardware-accelerated 2D
and 3D environments in real time. Edge360 works with iType on devices that
support OpenGL® ES 2.0 graphics processing technology.
Font support
In addition to a broad range of TrueType, OpenType and PostScript (CFF and CID
format) multilingual typefaces,
East Asian font offerings, and the WorldType® font
suite, Monotype Imaging offers a line-up of
fonts tailored for use on consumer device displays. These fonts,
combined with the iType font engine, enable the various Monotype Imaging
innovations which ensure the full display of characters within limited
screen real estate. East Asian varieties of these fonts support Monotype
Imaging’s SmartHint™ technology and Edge
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 our 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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