| Font Fusion |
overview • DEMO • font compression • display modes • plug-in, Symbian OS • digital tv • white papers • contact • home |
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| Overview Bitstream's Font Fusion is a font subsystem that allows developers to render high-quality characters in any format, at any resolution, on any device. It is designed to support operating systems, software applications, Web applications, low-resolution screen devices, multimedia servers, high-definition television screens (HDTVs), set-top boxes, continuous tone printers, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and other embedded systems and Internet appliances. Font Fusion marks the convergence of Bitstream's TrueDoc and T2Krasterizers, available in an advanced, object-oriented architecture. This document includes the following topics:
Summary As a developer, you strive to deliver products that require a little memory and perform well. One important but frequently overlooked aspect of performance is the appearance of displayed text. Unclear, jagged characters force customers to focus more on a product's limitations than on its ease of use. Clear text that is easy to read on any device, at any size, and at any resolution is immeasurably important. Font Fusion can give you these results. If you need to render high-quality characters in any language, you need Font Fusion. Consider this: First, Font Fusion is a small, fast, object-oriented font engine that can fit into a small amount of code space (typically, anywhere from 35 KB on up, depending on the options you compile). Second, our font engine can render any industry-standard font format,including our own compact, stroke-based CJK (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) fonts. Third, you can include our core set of delta-hinted fonts, our stroke-based CJK fonts, or any other Latin or non-Latin fonts in your resident font set. Our code is very compact. For instance, the Font Fusion engine and a Traditional Chinese stroke-based font containing over 13,500 characters occupies less than 0.5 MB! You heard right-less than half a megabyte. Architectural Overview Font Fusion includes three components:
The Font Manager supports multiple fonts and font fragments, while the Cache Manager boosts overall system performance by taking advantage of memory resources. Font Fusion allows your application to:
Key Features
* The Digital Audio Visual Council (DAVIC), which sets multimedia standards for international broadcasting, has adopted Bitstream's PFR (portable font resource, also known as a Web font) as its standard font format. DVB ( Digital Video Broadcasting) is a Swiss-based industry organization representing one standard for digital TV, which has been adopted extensively in Europe. DTG (Digital TV Group) coordinates standards for Digital TV broadcasting in the United Kingdom. Other Features
Devices Supported Bitstream Font Fusion can output characters to any bitmap device. In addition, Font Fusion can optimize the output quality for these devices:
Operating Systems and Applications Supported
Font Fusion can render characters from all of the following font formats:
Figure 2. A sample of stroke-based, traditional Chinese characters generated on screen. A traditional Chinese font, in Font Fusion stroke (FFS) format, containing over 13,000 characters occupies approximately 0.5MB! Font Fusion can render any character shape (regardless of the complexity of the shape), is fully compatible with double-byte non-Latin fonts, and supports languages written vertically or right to left. Because Font Fusion can render PFR (portable font resource, also known as a Web font) data stored locally or downloaded from other sources, an interactive TV system, for example, can support multiple languages without embedding large amounts of font data in a set-top box.
Figure 3. A sample of international characters recorded for a portable font resource and regenerated on screen in an Internet browser. The zoomed-in box illustrates anti-aliasing capabilities. (Note the gray pixels at the edges of the character.) Font Fusion contains the following enhancements to ensure the highest quality output on a variety of devices:
Font Fusion includes an anti-aliasing (sometimes called grayscaling) output module, which ensures smooth, well-defined character edges at all resolutions.
Figure 4. The anti-aliasing technology developed by Bitstream for Font Fusion provides for layers of pixels of up to 256 shades of gray (or other colors) to soften the hard edges that often result when character outlines are fixed to a grid pattern. Your application has the unique capability of supplying a filter function "plug-in" to perform post-processing on images that the Font Fusion Core produces. The Core creates bitmaps in either 1-bit or 8-bit depth (alpha values range from 0 to 126). To these bitmaps you can apply Gaussian fuzz-filtering, smearing, colorizing, or even texture mapping in a filter function.
Figure 5. Using Font Fusion, you can take a single-color character and create a multiple-color character, complete with a border. The border is anti-aliased to the background, and the interior color is anti-aliased to the border. With its subpixel positioning technology, Font Fusion can accurately adjust and control the placement of characters. Previously, outlines of character shapes were simply fitted to character grids in an output device (such as a laser printer or a computer screen). If a pixel fell within the outline of a character shape, the pixel was turned on. If not, the pixel was left off. When using anti-aliasing (grayscale output module) with this technology, Font Fusion can control the placement of characters down to one-sixteenth of a pixel. This can solve many problems that occur when trying to compose text on a low-resolution device, such as a TV screen. Characters can be placed at subpixel positions of whole, half, quarter, eighth, and sixteenth pixels both in the x and y dimensions. This allows for exceptional character spacing and quality, even when text is rotated. Conclusion Font Fusion provides developers with full font fidelity and high-quality typographic output at any resolution on any device, while maintaining the integrity of the original character shapes. Here are the most important features of Font Fusion to consider:
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