Monotype Imaging (News - Alert) Holdings Inc., a company offering text imaging solutions, is launching version 4.1 of its iType scalable font engine and version 3.1 of its WorldType Layout Engine product.

 

With the new releases, manufacturers and developers of low- to high-end consumer electronics devices will be able to develop products that display scalable text with clarity, consistency and style.

 

The iType font engine will now support Monotype Imaging’s Edge Technology. The technology is an advanced font rendering solution available optionally as a plug-in for the engine.

 

The engine enables OEMs and developers to efficiently build products that clearly display text-based on outline or stroke font data. It supports TrueType faces, the company’s Compact Asian for TrueType Technology (CATT) fonts, stroke fonts, bitmaps, embedded bitmaps, font subsets, custom fonts and linked fonts.

 

With the help of Monotype's SmartHint technology, the iType font engine offers high-quality display of East Asian text, using stroke-based fonts.

 

iType version 4.1 supports an optional ‘dynamic’ font linking operation, which allows fonts to be linked at run-time. Deploying this capability, devices will become more flexible while handling different fonts, including those downloaded to the device. It will be helpful in further enhancing and personalizing the user experience.

 

The WorldType Layout Engine is a product by Monotype that works with the iType font engine to compose, position and render multilingual text.

 

It is able to automatically interpret linguistic traits that are part of complex writing systems, such as Arabic, Hebrew and Indic scripts, and enables capabilities, such as bidirectional text flow, contextual character substitution and positioning, ligature and accent placement.

 

It also supports cursor positioning and paragraph alignment, proper line breaking and the intermixing of text and graphics, and is compatible with most major languages of the world.

 

These languages include all languages based on Latin- and Cyrillic-based scripts, in addition to Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Arabic, Armenian, Assamese, Farsi (Persian), Greek, Hebrew, Thai, Syriac, Telugu, Urdu, Vietnamese (Latin plus diacritics) and the major written languages of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Africa.