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Monotype Imaging Announces Scalable Font Rendering Solution Licensed by Garmin for a Range of Automotive Navigation Devices
Thursday 08. May 2008 - Monotype Imaging Announces Scalable Font Rendering Solution Licensed by Garmin for a Range of Automotive Navigation DevicesWOBURN, Mass.MA-MONOTYPE-IMAGING
Monotype Imaging Inc. (Nasdaq: TYPE), a leading global provider of text imaging solutions, has announced that Garmin International Inc., a unit of Garmin Ltd. (Nasdaq: GRMN) and the global leader in satellite navigation, has licensed the iType font engine from Monotype Imaging to display scalable, high-quality text on a range of Garmin nüvi automotive navigation devices.
‘As a company focused on creating navigation and communication devices that enrich customers’ lives, Garmin is able to realize key benefits that are passed on to consumers through our font scaling technology,’ said John Seguin, executive vice president of Monotype Imaging. ‘We’ve tailored our iType font engine to enable memory-constrained, consumer electronics devices to display clear, aesthetically pleasing text that can be scaled to any size. Other key iType capabilities include fast rendering speed, small code size, and the ability to apply special effects, such as displaying text outlined in different colors. This enables text to stand out from detailed or colorful backgrounds, such as maps. As devices become more interactive throughout the world, we believe that fonts will take on an even more important role.’
‘The iType font engine is simply a good fit,’ said Steve Martin, vice president of engineering at Monotype Imaging. ‘Garmin is able to count on iType technology to render sharp, legible text across a wide range of screen sizes. Garmin is also able to reduce the font memory footprint of their devices, which means that more memory can become available for speeding the delivery of other on-screen features and services.’
About the iType font engine
Monotype Imaging’s iType scalable font engine, based on the OpenType and TrueType font formats, allows OEMs and developers to build products that clearly display characters regardless of screen resolution or display size. In addition to fonts optimized for consumer electronics devices and innovations such as Monotype Imaging’s patent-pending SmartHint’ technology, which enables the clear display of East Asian text, the iType font engine supports Monotype Imaging’s stroke-based fonts, multilingual TrueType fonts, custom typefaces, bitmaps, embedded bitmaps, font subsets and linked fonts.
The iType font engine removes dependency on bitmap fonts, which are fixed in size. While bitmap fonts require individual sets for each type size and style supported by the device, the iType font engine requires just one scalable font for each style to cover all sizes. By removing the burden of storing multiple bitmaps, device manufacturers and developers are able to reduce memory usage on fonts.