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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® and TrueType® font formats and packaged as ANSI C code for
broad, flexible integration, iType meets stringent size requirements for any
applications and devices, including those that support East Asian languages
requiring thousands of characters. Scalable outline or stroke characters are
dynamically rendered as bitmaps (single bit) or graymaps (2, 4 or 8 bit),
outlines or strokes to the specific size that the application has requested.
The font engine scales the outlines or strokes and then fills them in to render
the character to the specific size the application has requested. Hinting
instructions, if present within the outline or stroke font, are also rendered
to optimize characters at specific sizes to ensure crisp on-screen viewing.
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.
Edge360
Bring a whole new dimension to text with our new Edge360™ Technology, an embedded solution for delivering crisp, dynamic text in hardware-accelerated 2D and 3D environments in real time. Edge360 works with iType® 5.0 on devices that support OpenGL® ES 2.0 graphics processing technology.
Font support
In addition to TrueType and OpenType-based multilingual
typefaces, East Asian font offerings,
and the WorldType® font suite, Monotype Imaging
offers a line-up of ESQ® Mobile fonts tailored for
mobile phones and other display screens. ESQ Mobile fonts combined with the
iType font engine enable various Monotype Imaging
innovations, such as Fonts in a Box™
technology, which ensures the full display of characters within limited screen
real estate. East Asian varieties of ESQ Mobile fonts also support Monotype
Imaging’s SmartHint™ 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 Fonts in a Box and 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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