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Font Fusion Type Technology

White Paper

Font Fusion is a complete outline and stroke based platform-independent font engine. Font Fusion delivers a simple, efficient and compact font solution with multiple font format support. The Font Fusion Type Technology was developed by Bitstream as a superior next generation font technology architected for both the legacy formats of the past and the evolving requirements of the future. The break through Font Fusion technology is driven by Bitstream's technological vision and passion and extensive experience in digital type technology and it is the result of combining Type Solutions' T2K technology and Bitstream type technologies. Bitstream has also entered into many strategic licensing arrangements that does benefit Font Fusion. Bitstream's Font Fusion technology provides the essential font technology necessary to build systems that meet broad market needs. The ability to display and output high-quality characters for CJK languages from the ultra compact Font Fusion stroke font format enables developers of Internet appliances, wireless Internet devices, and other embedded systems to address new business opportunities for their products without the barriers imposed by the large size of conventional Asian fonts.

The Font Fusion typographical characteristics:

It produces a high typographic quality faithful to the original high resolution shape.
Absolutely stunning quality on color LCD screens as well as gray-scale screens.
Antialiased as well as monochrome text rendering with hinting optimized for the display device.
Offers resolution independence and scales characters on the fly.
Supports kerning.
Supports algorithmic bolding.

Font Fusion international script support:

Full Multilingual font capabilities, including 2 byte characters sets such as Unicode and Kanji fonts.
Supports both horizontal and vertical metrics.
Very compact font sizes for reduced storage requirements and faster network transfers; 13,854 character Unicode stroke font fits in 471 Kbytes!!! Can store 7800+ character outline Kanji fonts in below one megabyte. The compression is loss-less and the compressed font is directly rasterized by Font Fusion without a need for decompressing the data into RAM.
Full CJK support.

Devices suitable for Font Fusion:

Wireless Internet devices.
Ideal for anything from printers, to computer monitors, to television-screens, etc.
Excellent for displaying fonts on TV and HDTV screens due to a Font Fusion TV specific mode.
Excellent for device with a color LCD screen due to a color LCD option.
Embedded devices.
Cross-platform graphics applications.
Continuous tone printers.
Internet Appliances.
Embedded and Real Time Operating Systems.

Font Fusion technical characteristics:

Object oriented architecture for maximum reliability.
Object oriented clean API for easy integration.
Optimized native ANSI C design provides fast performance.
The code is small and lightweight for lowest possible memory requirements making it ideal for memory-constrained environments.
The code is written in industry standard ANSI C, allowing it to be ported to virtually any platform.
Independent of processor and OS.
Supports multiple threads.
Does not use any floating point math.
Independent of compiler structure alignments.
Little/big endian neutral.
Allows features to be selectively compiled for lowest possible code-size
Contains unique and sophisticated algorithms.
Computes gray-scale bitmaps directly without sampling down a larger bitmap.
Supports both local and remote fonts since it is network aware.
Fonts can for instance reside in RAM, ROM, the disk, or on a remote server.
Unsurpassed speed.

Font Formats supported by Font Fusion:

Font Fusion Stroke format
Bitstream PFR format
Roman T2K format
Kanji T2K format
TrueType format
TrueType Collection format
Type 1 format
CFF/Type 2 format
PCLeo format
PCLetto format
Speedo

Also supports embedded bitmaps in Font Fusion stroke format,PFR,T2K and TrueType formats, and even bitmap only fonts. Font Fusion is architected for both the legacy formats of the past and the evolving requirements of a networked world. The Font Fusion Stroke format is important since the entire stroke font is about the same size as just a single size 16*16 monochrome bitmap font!!! With the Font Fusion Stroke font you get scalability (all sizes), gray-scale/anti-aliasing + LCD-support (increases legibility and ability to read at a lower size), and variable boldness using only the same storage as the single size 16 point monochrome font!!! This is incredible!

The Font Fusion font sub-system

This is a high performance complete font-sub-system very suitable for memory constrained environments. It is available for license in both object and source code form. Embedded systems and printers can provide built in font support compactly while still supporting legacy formats. Cross-platform graphics applications using Type Solutions' Font Fusion font scaler can deliver their own fonts in a compact fashion, insuring that all aspects of the font display are identical on all platforms. The Font Fusion font rasterizer is robustly architected to achieve platform and OS independence in industry standard ANSI C, allowing it to run on virtually any platform and device. Font Fusion provides a complete state-of-the-art font sub-system. The preferred Font Fusion font-sub-system licensing structure involves an up-front technology transfer fee for the SDK, plus royalties for every unit sold.

Why use the Font Fusion font engine ?

The Type Solutions Font Fusion font engine offers the following benefits to our OEM customers:

High quality.
Extremely high speed (Worlds fastest font engine:-).
Low ROM requirements.
Low RAM requirements.
Low font sizes.
Robust object oriented architecture with error handling.
Easy to integrate.
Highly portable little/big endian neutral ANSI C design.
Simple and clean object oriented API.
Excellent support.
Available now.
Renders legacy formats such as Type 1 and TrueType.
Native TrueType hint support. It's the cleanest, and the only object oriented, TrueType rasterizer.
Extremely compact Font Fusion stroke font format
An optional font manager with dynamic font fragment support.
An optional bitmap cache.
Allows fonts to be stored in more compact T2K,PFR, or stroke formats.
We offer quick translation of fonts or entire font suites into T2K and PFR format.
Has the full support and backing of Bitstream Inc.

Please contact us by email if you have further questions and need more info.

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Type Solutions has your Type Solution!

Type Solutions, Inc. was founded in 1989 by Sampo Kaasila, lead engineer behind the TrueType technology while at Apple Computer, Inc.
Type Solutions, Inc. is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Bitstream Inc. The Internet Font Technology Company.

Last updated: July 25, 2000.
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Type Solutions Inc., Plaistow, NH 03865 U.S.A.
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