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The iType® font engine is a font rendering subsystem that brings the benefits of scalable type and high-quality multilingual font display to the embedded environment. iType offers a host of advanced capabilities including font linking, font management and discovery, support for various industry standards and font formats, and Edge™ Technology, which enables the display of stylistic East Asian text in a small memory footprint. iType can be implemented into various platforms using iType Connects™ plug-ins, helping to reduce time-to-market for OEMs.

Based on OpenType® and TrueType® font formats and packaged as ANSI C code for broad, flexible integration, iType meets stringent size requirements for any applications and devices, including those that support East Asian languages requiring thousands of characters. Scalable outline or stroke characters are dynamically rendered as bitmaps (single bit) or graymaps (2, 4 or 8 bit), outlines or strokes to the specific size that the application has requested. The font engine scales the outlines or strokes and then fills them in to render the character to the specific size the application has requested. Hinting instructions, if present within the outline or stroke font, are also rendered to optimize characters at specific sizes to ensure crisp on-screen viewing.

High performance architecture
Optimized for both space efficiency and speed, the iType subsystem lets you tune the engine’s already small footprint even smaller by selecting at build time only the resources you need. Performance features such as multithreading and high-speed character caching remove process bottlenecks and ensure that requested characters get generated and returned to applications when needed.

Patented font compression/decompression software saves significant memory for font data storage. These algorithms allow portions of font data to be decompressed as needed at run-time – so users receive space-saving benefits without paying performance penalties. Font compression can also be applied when downloading fonts between connected devices, reducing needed bandwidth and transmitted data size.

Font support
In addition to TrueType and OpenType-based multilingual typefaces, East Asian font offerings, and the WorldType® font suite, Monotype Imaging offers a line-up of ESQ® Mobile fonts tailored for mobile phones and other display screens. ESQ Mobile fonts combined with the iType font engine enable various Monotype Imaging innovations, such as Fonts in a Box™ technology, which ensures the full display of characters within limited screen real estate. East Asian varieties of ESQ Mobile fonts also support Monotype Imaging’s SmartHint™ technology.

For some low-end applications, however, bitmaps may be preferred. For those applications, Monotype Imaging offers a utility that converts scalable data to bitmaps. The fonts would appear the same as their scalable counterparts – creating a consistent font style across the product range. Bitmaps that have been converted from scalable type are also able to take advantage of innovations such as Fonts in a Box and SmartHint technologies. In addition, Monotype Imaging offers custom design services for scalable and bitmap fonts.

Integration with Monotype Imaging’s WorldType Layout Engine
The WorldType Layout Engine handles a wide range of writing systems in one very small package. The technology works with the iType font engine to ease the ability to internationalize products with which users need to interact in their native languages.

For a firsthand look at the capabilities of the iType scalable font engine, try Monotype Imaging's font technology demo. See how the iType font renderer interacts with the WorldType Layout Engine and a catalog of multilingual fonts to display high-quality text.