Prepress
Monotype Imaging Enhances its iType Font Engine and WorldType Layout Engine for Consumer Electronics Devices
Thursday 01. October 2009 - OEMs Benefit with Improved Speed, Memory Handling and Enhanced Support for Key Industry Specifications
Monotype Imaging Holdings Inc. (Nasdaq: TYPE), a leading global provider of text imaging solutions, has announced the releases of version 4.3 of its iType scalable font engine and version 3.2 of its WorldType Layout Engine. These latest releases build upon capabilities designed to ease the ability for manufacturers and developers of consumer electronics devices, such as mobile phones, digital televisions and set-top boxes, to adopt scalable fonts that display text with consistency, clarity and style.
Both new releases feature speed and memory management enhancements, aimed at increasing efficiency within the text rendering facilities of iType and the multilingual text layout functions of WorldType Layout Engine. The latest versions also include enhanced support for the OpenVG industry specification, which is designed to standardize the implementation of 2D vector graphic hardware acceleration to create richer graphics, while requiring less power.
“OEMs have varying performance and memory requirements relating to text display. Our newest releases are designed to achieve a balance thats right for the individual OEM in terms of fast performance and low memory usage,” said John Seguin, executive vice president of Monotype Imaging. “In addition, our focus on industry standards such as OpenVG continues to play an important role in our support of emerging trends, such as the display of super-rich graphical content – which includes text – on CE devices. Our latest releases are the result of working closely with customers to create solutions that meet evolving needs.”
iType font engine 4.3
Monotype Imaging’s iType scalable font engine enables device manufacturers and developers to build products that clearly display text based on outline or stroke font data. iType supports proprietary innovations, such as the companys Edge Technology, designed to display superior quality, typographically rich East Asian text, and SmartHint technology, a compact, stroke-based solution for displaying East Asian text. In addition, iType supports font downloading and font management capabilities as outlined in industry standards such as the Java MIDP3 specification, also known as JSR 271. iType includes enhanced APIs to support VGPath and VGImage objects used within OpenVG implementations.
New in iType 4.3 is an outline effect that enables text to appear as if its glowing. The glow simulation results from specifying a dark outline which grows lighter as the eye moves out from the text.
The iType font engine supports a variety of font formats, including TrueType fonts, Monotype Imagings CATT (Compact Asian for TrueType Technology) fonts, Edge fonts, stroke fonts, bitmaps, embedded bitmaps, font subsets, custom fonts and linked fonts.
OEM-ready font packages are available to comply with industry specifications, such as the U.S. Federal Communications Commissions requirements for television closed captioning display, and Japans Association of Radio Industries and Businesses data coding and transmission specification for digital broadcasting. Fonts are also available that are designed specifically to display legibly on a wide variety of screens, regardless of screen resolution.
WorldType Layout Engine 3.2
Monotype Imagings WorldType Layout Engine works with iType to compose, position and render multilingual text. WorldType Layout engine features the ability to automatically interpret linguistic traits that are part of complex writing systems such as Arabic, Hebrew and Indic scripts. Capabilities include bidirectional text flow, contextual character substitution and positioning, ligature and accent placement, cursor positioning and paragraph alignment, proper line breaking and the intermixing of text and graphics. Most major languages of the world are supported, including all languages based on Latin- and Cyrillic-based scripts, in addition to Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Arabic, Armenian, Assamese, Farsi (Persian), Greek, Hebrew, Thai, Syriac, Telugu, Urdu, Vietnamese (Latin plus diacritics) and the major written languages of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Africa. Version 3.2 of WorldType Layout Engine adds support for the Khmer, Tibetan and Mongolian languages.
WorldType Layout Engine version 3.2 introduces the ability to handle VGPath, VGImage and VGFont objects, used within OpenVG implementations. Also new is the ability to work with iTypes caching mechanism and the device hardwares caching system simultaneously, enabling OEMs to more easily combine OpenVG hardware acceleration and multilingual support. In addition, the latest release of WorldType Layout Engine provides the font management and discovery features needed to support MIDP3 platform implementations.