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| Overview Bitstream's TrueDoc technology solves font fidelity problems for many digital communications markets, delivering a quicker and more compact font solution while maintaining the highest standards in typographic quality. TrueDoc is completely independent of platform, operating system, application, resolution, and device. The TrueDoc software development kit (SDK) consists of two main components: the Character Shape Recorder (CSR) and the Character Shape Player (CSP). The CSR records character shapes (glyphs) and stores them in a highly compressed data structure, the Portable Font Resource (PFR). The CSP retrieves the data from the PFR and recreates the character shapes on the fly, delivering bitmaps or outlines, depending on the output device. When developing the components, Bitstream kept these key considerations in mind:
TrueDoc successfully addresses all of these concerns. The SDK is written in standard ANSI C code and comes with comprehensive documentation and sample code. Bitstream provides technical support to all licensed developers. Bitstream TrueDoc strives to emerge as an industry standard, one that addresses the need for font fidelity. Bitstream's plans for TrueDoc include its integration into many successful technologies in a variety of digital communications markets.
The "New Document" As quickly as engineers create one set of tools and solutions, market needs and users' imaginations set expectations for the next wave. To be accepted as enduring standards, technologies must solve a wide range of problems. They must also provide key industry players, such as software developers, equipment manufacturers, and value-added resellers, with better opportunities to compete in emerging markets. This is the goal for Bitstream TrueDoc. In the race to define the "new document"--one of the hottest emerging markets--not only are the standards in flux, but the definition of the document itself also keeps evolving. Today's electronic document is a long way from yesterday's plain text file sent from a single workstation to the printer. With the new versatility that portable document applications provide, documents gain wider movement among workstations, platforms, operating systems, and applications. Today, everyone is a publisher to some extent, whether e-mailing memos, designing brochures, or publishing information on the Internet. Portable electronic documents, electronic publishing, and online information are gaining popularity among individuals and organizations alike. But the variety of hardware and software--from platforms and operating systems to applications and fonts--greatly complicates the electronic distribution and delivery process. There are so many system configurations and, consequently, many stumbling blocks preventing smooth communication. None of the electronic document distribution applications now available work on all systems. Electronic soft copy hasn't achieved the same reliability and font fidelity as hard copy, the standard that users go by. Authors and publishers want to make their products more appealing by using the fonts that best suit their needs, but readers don't want to buy them. Fonts matter. PostScript, with its ability to reproduce well-designed fonts on computers and laser printers, is widely acknowledged as a powerful catalyst in the personal computer revolution. While fonts in themselves have generally been undervalued, the ability to create visually compelling documents is one force that has driven technology. To those focused on the minimal communication of information, font fidelity may not be a top priority, but to those looking to increase their market advantage and appeal, compelling documents (and hence, fonts) play an essential role in their future. Because of the market advantage they give, high-quality fonts will play an increasingly important role in compound electronic documents, Internet publishing, and even Sega interfaces for the next generation of computer users. Bitstream TrueDoc is a universal font translator that can solve the font fidelity issues of the "new document," thus allowing it to evolve. Emerging Markets Any digital communications market that relies on the attractive and accurate presentation of electronic information has a need for TrueDoc. People have long become accustomed to high typographic quality in hard copy documents, and business people often spend time and money to gain the highest quality output. Yet the same people are forced to send and receive electronic mail, documents, reports, and proposals electronically in one standard font, or else resign themselves to unpredictable results. The first products to provide users with the same quality and freedom of typographic expression in electronic documents that they receive in print can quickly gain a wide and loyal customer base. Online Services Online services provide an effective way to send text and graphics electronically between users on various machines and systems. What they lack, however, is attractive presentation and varied font selection, since they often use only one basic font. To update their look and feel, online services can deliver platform- and system-independent font rendering for the screen and printer, letting subscribers receive and send richly formatted documents. The resulting attractiveness, ease of use, and reliability can increase their services' appeal and accessibility to the rapidly expanding audience of new computer users, who expect information to be presented as attractively as in the print or television media they are familiar with. Some online services currently address the font issue by providing fonts that subscribers install on their systems so they can render type on the screen. However, this means that users have to go through a complicated system install, which also requires them to use up hard disk space and memory to store and read the new fonts. TrueDoc provides a better solution. Users can install the TrueDoc viewer (Character Shape Player, or CSP) within the online service's software application, enabling it to render fonts without relying on the subscriber's system. This is invaluable for presenting pre-formatted information, such as advertisements or special flyers. Portable Electronic Documents An estimated eighty percent of all corporate information today exists digitally and is viewed, shared, distributed, and managed electronically. Different platforms, operating systems, applications, and printers hamper the sharing, distributing, and viewing of documents, however. Documents that use different font formats, such as TrueType, PostScript, and other formats, further complicate the viewing of electronic documents. Portable document technologies attempt to address the problems of portable electronic documents, with the goal of maintaining the look and feel of the original document as closely as possible on all screens and printers, regardless of platform, hardware, or software. But documents that these products create and move tend to suffer from a host of problems. These problems include large documents that take a long time to transmit and to display on the screen, incompatible font formats, and poor quality when rendering type on screen and printer devices of differing resolutions. Font-related problems are especially troublesome for companies developing portable electronic document products. Embedding fonts within the portable documents results not only in large documents, as just mentioned, but also raises font ownership issues. Relying on system-level font services results in platform incompatibilities. Furthermore, font matching, font substitution, and font synthesizing have not proven reliable at achieving true font fidelity. A developer can embed Bitstream TrueDoc within a portable document application to resolve these font problems. The CSP sits in the portable document software on the receiving end and generates images of the character shapes from the PFR file. TrueDoc does not address the page and its elements as a whole and, thus, is an OEM font technology tool that developers can easily integrate with their applications. CD-ROM Authoring and Publishing Publishers such as Comptons and RR Donnelly use CD-ROMs to publish everything from games and movies to encyclopedias and phone books. Just as it is with any other communications medium, the presentation of material on CD-ROM is as important as its content. But since CD-ROMs are read-only and do not pose the same kinds of memory restrictions as floppy disks, publishers are free to embed the fonts they need to display information, barring licensing issues. This method, however, still relies on the user's system to access and render the fonts. TrueDoc, on the other hand, provides a completely self-contained and platform-independent solution that does not rely on system resources. So, to more easily reach global markets, a Latin language-based CD can now be played on an Arabic or Japanese machine, or on any version of Windows. The CD-ROM publisher can store the Character Shape Player on the CD-ROM, where it is invisible to the user. TrueDoc can also be an optional element on the CD-ROM; oblivious to users, it runs when they want to print one or more pages from the CD-ROM. Legal Issues Legitimate licensees of fonts or font software can create, print, copy, or distribute documents anywhere in the world. After all, that is what publishing is all about, and that is precisely why font vendors create and sell their font products. The end result of distributing a document electronically and printing it at its intended destinations is no different from printing and distributing the document. Similarly, TrueDoc lets publishers distribute documents electronically for viewing or printing anywhere in the world--but without, for instance, the resolution limitations associated with faxing. TrueDoc captures character shapes, encodes the shapes digitally, and allows them to be transmitted to recipients, maintaining, within the reproduced document, the typographic quality that the author intended. In other words, TrueDoc TrueDoc provides a way to reproduce the original look of a document. When recording characters, the TrueDoc recorder does not access the original font directly. In addition, TrueDoc does not copy or use any hinting information from the original font. TrueDoc's internal, automatic hinting process handles all hinting to guarantee exceptional quality on all devices. TrueDoc works differently from font embedding, which must conform to the explicit software license granted by the individual font foundry. Many font foundries grant local user licenses. For example, many license agreements clearly state that "a user may install the enclosed font(s) on up to five workstations only" or that "font programs may not be disassembled or transmitted." TrueDoc regenerates curves and hints so that the resulting character shapes are suitable for transporting and imaging. TrueDoc can generate standard font formats at the receiving end, so that they can work seamlessly with existing operating systems and printers. These generated fonts are installed only temporarily for the purpose of rendering and viewing the original document. Bitstream does not condone and does not knowingly allow such regenerated fonts to be used for any other purpose. Bitstream's goal is to give electronic publishers control over the look of their documents, the same control that print publishers have now. Conclusion Corporations are buying document tools that let employees identify, store, track, retrieve, and view information more efficiently. Fundamental document technologies may replace the current application and system software models, transforming both the way people work and the way software is sold. Information services, network developers, and multimedia publishers are all looking to the next stage of competition and expansion. Bitstream's TrueDoc technology can play a powerful role in helping these visions become reality. |
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