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| Monotype Imaging Ships iType Font Engine 3.0 Monotype Imaging's iType font engine 3.0, the latest version of the company's embedded subsystem for generating text on consumer electronics devices, delivers a new level of display quality for East Asian text on mobile phones to meet increasing demands for emerging markets such as China. Monotype Imaging has equipped its latest iType release to support patent-pending methods the company has devised for the high-quality display of intricate letterforms such as those found in Chinese, Japanese and Korean writing systems. The new capabilities will also enable customers such as handset manufacturers to reduce design and production complexities and gain time-to-market advantages. Monotype Imaging's patent-pending technique for enabling the clear display of scalable East Asian characters without bitmaps involves a new method of character fine-tuning - or hinting - to ensure the on-screen legibility of text from 14 to 50 pixels per em. Monotype Imaging's approach, called SmartHint technology, is the result of collaboration with China Type Design, the new Hong Kong-based subsidiary that Monotype Imaging is announcing. The SmartHint method improves display quality while reducing the number of instructions required for each hint, thereby reducing file size and storage requirements. While hinting techniques are not new - typographic specialists have applied hints to characters within select fonts to improve their appearance on low-resolution monitors - the hinting of small-sized East Asian characters using available methods has resulted in file sizes that are too large for memory-constrained devices such as cell phones. Monotype Imaging's SmartHint method coupled with the company's new patent-pending hint compression and decompression technologies, supported by the iType 3.0 font engine, result in small, manageable font files containing SmartHint instructions. Although cell phones are increasingly employing scalable font technologies, support for complex East Asian characters at small sizes has remained challenging. A standard solution involves creating simplified, bitmap representations of characters at specific, small sizes and embedding those bitmaps within the scalable solution. When a small-sized character is requested by the cell phone user, the embedded bitmap is displayed, rather than a scaled version of the character. The iType 3.0 software development kit includes a fully scalable, SmartHint-enabled stroke-based Simplified Chinese font, which supports the standard GBK Chinese character set of approximately 21.000 characters. The iType 3.0 release also supports a SmartHint-enabled Simplified Chinese stroke font based on the GB18030 Chinese character set standard. A Japanese stroke font based on SmartHint technology is scheduled for release later this year, with Traditional Chinese and Korean versions becoming available next year. write your comments about the article :: © 2006 Computing News :: home page |