“We’ve built a wealth of knowledge working with leading consumer electronics device manufacturers worldwide to deliver scalable font solutions capable of performing in tightly constrained development environments,” said John Seguin, executive vice president of Monotype Imaging Inc. “Customers are also realizing that scalable, stylistic fonts can play a positive role toward enriching the user experience. Our new multilingual fonts help remove time-to-market barriers that have slowed the adoption of scalable, aesthetically pleasing fonts in memory-constrained devices.”

WorldType Font Solution

Building on its WorldType® brand of products for multilingual development environments, Monotype Imaging has introduced a WorldType font suite that contains readily available fonts in different world scripts. The fonts can be linked with aesthetically compatible fonts based on the WGL character set for European languages.

“Minimizing time-to-market is often the most critical concern for device manufacturers,” said Geoff Greve, vice president of font development at Monotype Imaging. “Language coverage can be complicated and lead to development delays and costly customization. OEMs and developers can now pick and choose the languages they need while being assured fonts will work harmoniously with each other and look great straight out of the box. Users of consumer electronics devices also benefit – they’re able to access characters of different languages with what seems to be a single font.”

Monotype Imaging’s introductory WorldType font suite, which supports the Bengali, Devanagari, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayam and Tamil Indic scripts in addition to the Arabic, Hebrew and Thai scripts, has been designed to complement many sans serif typeface designs. The Univers® and Univers Condensed faces from the Linotype® Library are the first to support the multilingual fonts in this WorldType suite.

“In many ways, Univers is an ideal typeface for consumer electronics devices,” said Allan Haley, director of words and letters at Monotype Imaging. “Designed in the 1950s by Adrian Frutiger, who’s still a contemporary master of typeface design, Univers is able to retain character legibility at small sizes and at modest screen resolutions.”

All fonts in the new WorldType suite have been “height restricted” to ensure characters display fully within an em square – the amount of space allotted to each character on small displays such as cell phones. “The fonts have also been vertically aligned, which offers various benefits,” said Haley. “Device manufacturers switching from the use of fixed-in-size bitmap fonts, for example, are able to efficiently integrate a scalable solution that performs similarly to bitmaps – characters display fully and predictably along even baselines. Users are able to combine or switch between languages on a device, and every character will appear aligned and in proportion to one another.”

Fonts that are part of the new WorldType font suite can also be linked to Monotype Imaging’s fonts for East Asian languages that are available in various formats: simple stroke-based, stroke-based enhanced with patent-pending SmartHint™ technology, East Asian TrueType® fonts and the company’s new Compact Asian TrueType fonts.

Compact Asian TrueType Fonts

Monotype Imaging has introduced “CATT” fonts which require significantly less memory compared to the same fonts available in the larger-sized TrueType format. “While traditional TrueType fonts can bring style and aesthetics to devices that support high-resolutions screens, these fonts can overburden memory-restricted devices,” said Steve Martin, vice president of engineering at Monotype Imaging. ”Our challenge has been to open the door to increased style and selection that TrueType fonts offer – but without taxing memory. Our new CATT fonts answer this challenge.” Monotype Imaging’s CATT-enhanced CSong™ Light Simplified Chinese font, for example, which complies with the GB 18030 Chinese character set standard, is 21 percent the size of its regular TrueType version, a reduction of 7.7 MB.

In addition to the CSong font, Monotype Imaging offers CATT-enhanced MHei™ and MKai™ GB 18030-compliant Simplified Chinese fonts, MHei and MKai Traditional Chinese fonts that comply to the Big5-HKSCS Chinese character set standard, TB Gothic™ and Heisei Gothic™ Japanese fonts based on the JIS X 0208 and JIS X 0213 character sets respectively, and the MT Hangul Gothic™ Korean typeface, based on the KSCx1001 character set. Additional TrueType fonts will be CATT-enhanced based on market demand.

Monotype Imaging’s new multilingual font solutions work with the company’s iType® font engine, a scalable subsystem that enables OEMs and developers to build products that clearly display characters based on outline or stroke font data, and Monotype Imaging’s WorldType Layout Engine, which works with the iType font engine to compose, position and render multilingual text. In addition to Monotype Imaging’s new WorldType and CATT font solutions, the company today announced version 4.0 of its iType font engine and version 3.0 of its WorldType Layout Engine, respectively.

About Monotype Imaging

Monotype Imaging is a global provider of text imaging solutions for manufacturers and developers of consumer electronics devices including laser printers, copiers, mobile phones, digital televisions, set-top boxes, digital cameras and software applications and operating systems. The company also provides printer drivers and color imaging technologies to OEMs (original equipment manufacturers). Monotype Imaging technologies are combined with access to more than 9,000 typefaces from the Monotype®, Linotype and ITC® typeface libraries – home to some of the world’s most widely used designs, including the Times New Roman®, Helvetica® and ITC Franklin Gothic™ typefaces. Fonts are licensed to creative and business professionals through custom font design services, direct sales or e-commerce portals. Monotype Imaging offers fonts and industry-standard solutions that support all of the world’s major languages. Information about the company and its products can be found at www.monotypeimaging.com, www.fonts.com, www.linotype.com, www.monotypefonts.com, www.itcfonts.com, www.customfonts.com, www.fontwise.com, www.fonts.hk and www.faces.co.uk. The company is based in Woburn, Mass., with regional offices in the U.K., Germany (Linotype), Mt. Prospect, Ill., Redwood City, Calif., Boulder, Colo., Japan and China.

Monotype, WorldType and iType are trademarks of Monotype Imaging Inc. registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and may be registered in certain jurisdictions. SmartHint, CSong and MT Hangul Gothic are trademarks of Monotype Imaging Inc. and may be registered in certain jurisdictions. MHei, MKai and Times New Roman are trademarks of The Monotype Corp. registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and may be registered in certain jurisdictions. Heisei Gothic was developed by member companies of the Font Development and Promotion Committee under the Japanese Standard Association. TB Gothic is a trademark of Type Bank Co., Ltd. ITC is a trademark of International Typeface Corp. registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and may be registered in certain jurisdictions. ITC Franklin Gothic is a trademark of International Typeface Corp. and may be registered in certain jurisdictions. Linotype is a trademark of Linotype GmbH registered in the U. S. Patent and Trademark Office and may be registered in certain jurisdictions. Helvetica and Univers are trademarks of Linotype Corp. registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and may be registered in certain jurisdictions in the name of Linotype Corp. or its licensee Linotype GmbH. TrueType is a trademark of Apple Inc. registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and other countries.