“Companies today are creating products that must support languages in all countries in which they’re sold or marketed. This new release of Bitstream Panorama gives developers anywhere the ability to compose text in any language. This includes complex scripting languages like Arabic, Hebrew, and Indian,” said Anna Chagnon, President and CEO of Bitstream. “Together with Font Fusion®, Bitstream Panorama offers a complete line layout and font rendering solution for developers building consumer electronics devices, mobile phones, set-top boxes, and small embedded systems. This is a great product for developers who need a global font solution they can implement quickly and upgrade at any time.”

The following features were added for the Bitstream Panorama 2.0 release:

• New shaping engine for Arabic, Hebrew, and Indian languages and scripts
• Support for bi-directional and mixed-directional languages on the same line(s) of text
• Support for layout of text in paragraph blocks
• Support for text rendering of any length
• Support for standard character set encodings (UTF8, UTF16, Unicode, ASCII)
• Updated demo applications

“Arabic, Hebrew, and Indian each have different language rules. This makes rendering fonts for these languages even more complex,” stated Sampo Kaasila, Vice-President of Research and Development for Bitstream. “This new release of Bitstream Panorama both interprets OpenType rules and relies on its new shaping engine to substitute and position characters for scripting languages, resulting in a complete text composition solution for our developers.”

About

Bitstream Panorama
Bitstream Panorama is an easy-to-integrate product for consumer electronics devices, mobile phones, set-top boxes, and embedded systems. A small, portable, global text composition engine, Bitstream Panorama enables developers to draw strings of characters and lay out complex lines of text. The product supports all international languages, including Arabic and Indian scripts.

Bitstream Panorama is object-oriented code written in C and a subset of C++ suitable for small embedded systems and devices. The product can be ported to any platform.

OpenType Features

• Can turn any feature on or off, apply them individually, and get the combined output
• Supports important OpenType tables necessary for line layout: GDEF, GPOS, and GSUB
• Supports kerning information in OpenType fonts
• Supports contextual substitution for scripting languages
• Supports glyph substitution (GSUB), including settings for script, language, and feature tags

Color Formats

• Supports industry-standard screen color formats including monochrome, RGB, and BGR
• Supports 8 different pixel depths for R,G, and B color in RGB or BGR format

Anti-Aliasing

• Monochrome
• Grayscale
• LCD optimized

Text Styles and Effects

• Embossed
• Engraved
• Left Drop Shadow
• Right Drop Shadow
• Italics
• Bold
• Underline
• Strikethrough

Alignment and Positioning

• Supports left, right, centered, and justified alignment of text
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• Can customize left and right indentation space

Customizable

• Port to any platform
• Highly configurable, depending on trade-offs between code size and feature support
• Use any OpenType features you want, and turn off the features you don’t want
• Choose glyphs to substitute on the fly
• Get glyph data in many ways, depending on your requirements for conserving speed and performance.

Bitstream
Bitstream Inc. (NASDAQ: BITS) is a software development company that makes communications compelling. Bitstream enables customers worldwide to render high-quality text, browse the Web on wireless devices, select from the largest collection of fonts online, and customize documents over the Internet. Its core competencies include font technology, browsing technology, e-commerce technology, and publishing technology. For more information, please visit Bitstream at http://www.bitstream.com.

Bitstream and Font Fusion are registered trademarks and the Bitstream logo and Bitstream Panorama are trademarks of Bitstream Inc. Other technologies and brand names are used for information only and remain trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.

Contact

Anna Chagnon
President and CEO
Bitstream Inc.
617.520.8619