UFST – Universal Font Scaling Technology

Font Rendering Subsystem for Printers Compatible with PCL, PostScript and Other Font Specifications

Monotype Imaging’s UFST® subsystem lets OEMs build printer devices that are compatible with either the Adobe® PostScript® or Hewlett-Packard® PCL® printing languages, the leading industry standards. The technology is also compatible with devices that emulate both standards as well as the PDF, XHTML and XPS printing languages. Additionally, UFST renders text on low-resolution screens, providing a single solution for output, whether text appears in print or on control panel displays.

Efficient High-Resolution Output
The UFST solution reads, interprets and processes hinted font data to rapidly generate scaled character bitmaps, graymaps or grid-aligned outlines. The fast, compact solution offers a lower ROM cost than alternative font rendering systems and is the only one that uses industry-standard trademarked font names and font metrics, ensuring compatibility with printers based on font standards by HP and Adobe.

Control Panel Display Support
Font rendering capabilities can be leveraged for high-resolution, printed output or for display on low-resolution, control panel displays. Printer manufacturers already working with UFST in the print environment can also leverage the technology for use on control panel displays without sacrificing ROM space. Monotype Imaging's control panel display solutions are paired with a wide selection of multilingual fonts in highly compressed formats to meet requirements within memory-constrained environments. The UFST subsystem addresses the challenges of displaying East Asian text clearly at small sizes through use of our patent-pending SmartHint™ technology. Click here for more information on our control panel display solutions.

Compatibility in a Small Footprint
The UFST solution works with our patented MicroType® font compression technology, which reduces the MTI/HP 45 font collection to only 650KB. Just 1.3MB of ROM is required for our PostScript 3-compatible fonts, much less than the 2MB required for alternative subsystems. OEMs can also achieve dual-emulation capabilities by combining the MTI/HP 45 and MTI/PS 35 or 136 collections into a single, memory-efficient ROM block. Every font is compatible with its HP or Adobe counterpart in both design and metrics.

Flexibility and Adherence to Industry Standards
All industry-standard font rasterizers such as the TrueType® and PostScript subsystems are supported, and UFST supports OpenType® CFF (Compact Font Format), as well as our MicroType and ACT™ (Asian Compression for TrueType™) font compression technologies. The UFST subsystem also supports composite, stroke-based fonts for integrating Asian languages – inherently large in file size – using the smallest possible file size.

Font Management Capability
Monotype Imaging’s Font Manager allows users to more easily manage large collections of TrueType and Type 1 fonts on Microsoft® Windows® computers. Simple functions are available including installing and uninstalling fonts, viewing font samples on screen, sorting alphabetically or by font format, creating font groups and printing font lists. The Font Manager includes fonts that are compatible with the PCL or PostScript standards, or OEMs can integrate custom font sets to meet specific market needs.

UFST Benefits
   • Compatibility with HP PCL 6, 5e and 5c font standards
   • Compatibility with PostScript 3 and PostScript Level 2 font standards
   • Compatibility with PCL/PostScript dual-emulation systems
   • High-performance, small code size
   • Industry-standard trademarked typeface names
   • Asian font support using small, stroke-based fonts

In addition, the UFST solution supports:
   • Arabic, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew and Latin 1, 2, 5 and 6 character sets
   • Euro currency character in every font (single Euro provided for all Adobe® fonts)
   • Customized font collections
   • Industry-standard font rasterizers and font formats
   • Embedded bitmaps in TrueType fonts
   • 1-bit special effects: shadowing, embossing, engraving and outlining
   • Support for native 64-bit systems
   • HP’s Format 10 and Format 11 PCLEOs
   • Central European character set (provided in MTI/PS3 136 font set)
   • Multiple Master fonts (2 provided in MTI/PS3 136 font set)
   • Grayscale
   • Reentrancy
   • Multithreading
   • Pseudo emboldening
   • Combined ROM disk access