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Monotype Imaging Announces iType Connects Plug-in for Android Mobile Platform
Tuesday 21. July 2009 - iType Connects Scalable Font Rendering Solution Targets OEMs Seeking Improved Time to Market using Fonts Optimized for Legibility and High Quality Display on Mobile Phones
Monotype Imaging Holdings Inc. (Nasdaq: TYPE), a leading global provider of text imaging solutions, has announced that its iType font engine is available as an iType Connects plug-in for the Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) Android mobile technology platform. As an OEM-ready, scalable solution that helps device manufacturers speed time to market, iType Connects enables the ability to display text on mobile phones with consistency, clarity and style.
iType Connects offers advanced technologies that are not available through Androids default font engine, including:
Support for Edge Technology, Monotype Imagings most compact text rendering solution for displaying aesthetically pleasing East Asian text on memory-constrained devices. Edge Technology is designed to display text with superior clarity using typefaces that are rich in style.
Support for linked fonts, which improves flexibility when managing the font memory footprint of a device. For example, fonts may be linked to support multiple languages in order to conserve memory, or fonts may be linked to allow users to easily access unique characters within specialty fonts that are not contained in the active, primary font.
Support for Monotype Imagings stroke-based fonts for East Asian languages. Simple in design and engineered for low-memory devices, stroke-based fonts are also available as SmartHint fonts. Based on the companys SmartHint technology, SmartHint fonts are designed to preserve legibility of East Asian text, including characters that are intricately shaped and displayed at small text sizes.
“iType Connects allows us to extend access to the benefits of scalable fonts and font technologies into key development environments,” said John Seguin, executive vice president of Monotype Imaging. “OEMs can now take advantage of a solution that brings typographic distinction, high-quality text display and world language support to Android offerings.”
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 Androids 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 solution for set-top boxes.
iType font engine
Monotype Imagings iType font engine allows device manufacturers and developers to build products that clearly display text based on outline or stroke font data. 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.