Monotype Imaging, a provider of text imaging products, has revealed that its iType font engine is available as an iType Connects plug-in for the Google Android mobile technology platform. As an OEM-ready product, the new offering can reportedly display text on mobile phones with clarity and consistency.
The company claims that iType Connects offers technologies that are not available through Android’s default font engine, including: support for Edge technology which is the company’s compact text rendering product for displaying East Asian text on memory-constrained devices; support for linked fonts, which can manage the font memory footprint of a device; and support for its stroke-based fonts for East Asian languages.
Suited for low-memory devices, stroke-based fonts are also available as SmartHint fonts, the company said. Based on the company’s SmartHint technology, SmartHint fonts are said to be designed to preserve legibility of East Asian text, including characters that are displayed in small text sizes.
The iType Connects software development kit for Android includes source code for the iType font engine. The SDK also features software to enable direct connection from the iType Connects plug-in interface to Android’s Skia graphics library.
In addition to the Android platform, iType Connects SDKs are available for the Symbian OS and Qualcomm BREW platforms for mobile phones; Microsoft Windows Embedded CE 6.0 R2 and Linux open source platforms for a variety of consumer electronics devices; and the OpenTV Core2 middleware product for set-top boxes.
The company’s iType font engine allows device manufacturers and developers to build products that display text based on outline or stroke font data. The company said, in addition to proprietary innovations such as the company’s Edge and SmartHint technologies, iType supports TrueType fonts, the company’s CATT (Compact Asian for TrueType Technology) fonts, stroke fonts, bitmaps, embedded bitmaps, font subsets, custom fonts and linked fonts.
John Seguin, executive vice president of Monotype Imaging, said: iType Connects allows us to extend access to the benefits of scalable fonts and font technologies into key development environments. OEMs can now take advantage of a solution that brings typographic distinction, high-quality text display and world language support to Android offerings.
