Bitstream's premier font engine for Linux

Bitstream's btX2 is a ground-breaking font subsystem that brings sophisticated font capabilities to Linux and Unix. FreeType is an excellent font rendering system, but btX2 offers clear advantages. As a matter of fact, if you support FreeType, you support btX2.

btX2 relies on a FreeType driver that provides access to Font Fusion, our premier font rendering engine and the fastest font engine on the market. btX2 enables you to use the same calls as FreeType. In addition to these calls, you can use the native TV mode offered by Font Fusion to render fonts on TV screens.

btX2 Spec Sheet (pdf)

btX2 supports Unicode encoding and can render international fonts. Besides rendering industry-standard TrueType, Type 1, and PFR font formats, btX2 lets you render very compact Asian fonts in stroke-based format. Why is this important?

Stroke-based fonts replace an unmanageable, large font with a small, manageable font. With stroke-based fonts, you can:

• Scale characters to any size
  
  
• Use one font for all your weights, from light to bold
  
  
• Include all the characters in the font without having to subset it
  
  
• Stroke-based fonts & btX2 provide a high-end font engine that can fine tune output for computer monitors, TV screens, and LCD displays
  
  

Bitstream also lets developers create their own PFRs (portable font resources). The PFR is a compact, platform-independent format for representing high-quality characters from scalable fonts. The Bitstream PFR font format is open, public, and an industry standard.

The Bitstream PFR is the standard font format for digital TV. Besides being an ISO standard, it has also been adopted by ATSC, DASE, DAVIC, DTG, DVB, MHP, and OCAP.

btX2 is easily implemented. Our engineering team is very responsive. We stand by and assist you until everything is complete and you are 100% satisfied.

If you are building Linux applications and devices that need a small, fast font rendering engine, you need btX2!