May 2008
Monotype Imaging Holdings Inc. a leading global provider of text imaging solutions, has unveiled a new version of its UFST® (Universal Font Scaling Technology™) embedded font solution. Version 6.0 of UFST features capabilities to help printer manufacturers penetrate emerging markets, while addressing the growing need for MFPs (multifunction peripherals) and other printers to faithfully render high-quality, multilingual text on control panel displays as well as the printed page.
"As printer control panels adopt more sophisticated functions, such as the ability to present animated instruction manuals, browse the Internet or access e-mail, the ability to display high-quality, legible text becomes increasingly important for ensuring ease of use," said Dave McCarthy, vice president and general manager of Monotype Imaging's OEM business unit. "Our latest version of UFST is designed to help printer manufacturers more easily and efficiently extend market reach to meet text requirements for various parts of the world."
"UFST 6.0 allows for the rendering of clear, easy-to-read text whether for print or display, without requiring the implementation of two font renderers to enable both functions," said Steve Martin, vice president of engineering at Monotype Imaging. "The latest release is fully backward compatible with previous versions of UFST. Our customers can integrate the new version with the assurance that text will appear in print exactly the same as it will on devices already in the market that use our technology."
New to UFST is its ability to support scalable, stroke-based fonts enhanced with Monotype Imaging's patent-pending SmartHint™ technology, which enables the clear display of East Asian text in display environments, even when text appears at small sizes. SmartHint technology preserves spatial relationships and removes strokes of intricately shaped characters, if necessary, without changing the meaning of those characters. "Without SmartHint technology, complex East Asian characters can look blotted at small sizes. In the past, OEMs have had to settle for integrating embedded bitmaps to handle smaller text sizes on control panel displays. With SmartHint technology, OEMs are able to maintain a truly scalable solution," said Martin.
SmartHint-enabled East Asian fonts add to Monotype Imaging's stroke font offering, featuring the Monotype® Sans font, which allows OEMs to achieve worldwide language coverage in memory-constrained display environments. "Stroke-based fonts are dramatically smaller in file size compared to their TrueType® counterparts. Using our stroke-based solution, OEMs are able to embed more fonts to cover a greater geographic area with the same product configuration. Instead of developing and managing multiple printers embedded with varying font sets, one product or SKU is able to support font requirements for global or regional markets," said Martin.
UFST supports a wide range of multilingual typefaces in addition to stroke fonts, including Monotype Imaging's collection of Compact Asian Technology for TrueType (CATT™) fonts, which feature the same aesthetics as TrueType fonts, yet require significantly less memory. OEMs may also select from the Monotype Imaging WorldType® font suite, which contains readily available typefaces to support Indic, Arabic, Hebrew and Thai scripts in display environments. The fonts are complementary in design, allowing OEMs to build products that enable users to combine or switch between languages while using the control panel of a device.
UFST works with Monotype Imaging's WorldType Layout Engine, which handles the on-screen composition, positioning and rendering of multilingual text, including complex scripts such as Hindi, Hebrew and Thai. Unlike Latin-based languages where character forms stay constant, characters from complex scripts such as Arabic may take on different shapes depending on adjacent characters. A resulting word may have an appearance unlike the characters used to build the word. Other WorldType Layout Engine capabilities include bidirectional text flow, programmable cursor positioning, paragraph alignment, ligature and accent placement, appropriate line breaking and the ability to wrap text around graphics.
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