Font Fusion

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Bitstream Font Fusion

Bitstream Inc. Font Fusion rendering multiple-color bordered Greek characters, where the border is anti-aliased to the background, and the interior color is anti-aliased to the border.
Developed by Bitstream Inc.
Initial release October 1999
Latest release 4.5 / 2008
OS Platform Independent
Genre Font Engine
License Proprietary EULA
Website [1]

Bitstream Font Fusion is a small, fast, object-oriented font engine written in ANSI C capable of rendering high-quality text on any platform, any device, and at any resolution. The entire source code is portable, optimized, and executes independent of operating system and processor. The font engine is capable of rendering 2,400-3,300 characters per second on a 100 MIPS CPU [1].

Font Fusion is designed such that it can meet the memory and performance requirements, even if the Asian languages that contain thousands of characters are to be supported. Font Fusion is also the core technology behind other Bitstream products, Panorama, ThunderHawk and myMMS.

The company also offers a small, Java J2ME font engine for devices with tight memory requirements, which can efficiently draw text in any color across a variable color background. This can be used by J2ME applications on mobile handsets. This mini version support very compact bitmap fonts, which can be monochrome, and can use anti-aliasing techniques.

Contents

[edit] Version history

In late 1980s, Sampo Kaasila, lead developer of TrueType and founder of Type Solutions (now a wholly-owned subsidiary of Bitstream Inc.) designed T2K, a font renderer, which provided an object-oriented design, advanced architecture and algorithms, and was capable, to embed in all sorts of devices. Later in 1998, Bitstream acquired Type solutions and T2K evolved into Bitstream's font rasterizer, called Font Fusion.

Major version Minor version Release date Significant changes
Version 1 1.0 October 28, 1999 Initial release.
Version 2 2.0 July 18, 2000 Japanese/Korean Fonts support. Improved display of text for Internet appliances and wireless devices
2.1 June 12, 2001 Includes an optional 1.23 MB unified stroke-based font with 30,000 CJK characters
2.2 January 29, 2002 Includes the Wireless Font Set (four proportional, four monospaced, and one symbol font), designed specifically for handheld and wireless devices
2.3 April 2, 2002 OpenType Support. Support for FFC standards for closed captioning. Character edge effects. Pen Styles, Character Offsetting, and Pen Sizes. New CCTV font set.
2.4 April 08, 2003 Enhanced support for OpenType and Type 1 fonts allowing access to all characters. Plug-in filter for embedding of bitmaps.
2.5 June 22, 2004 Integration support for Panorama (enhanced support for text composition with simultaneous release of Bitstream Panorama). Support to modify the color tables. Improved stroke-based font output.
Version 3 3.0 June 6, 2005 New support for Font compression at all font formats
3.1 November 3, 2005 Caching for memory-constrained consumer devices and mobile phones
3.2 April 25, 2006 Optimized performance for mobile handsets and consumer electronics devices. Improved algorithms for compressed fonts. Optimized heap usage with fewer memory blocks. Reduced cache fragmentation
3.3 November 6, 2006 Improved font rendering speed for compressed fonts.
Version 4 4.0 September 24, 2007 Extension for BREW and new methods to create outline of the characters
4.5 April 10, 2008 Includes Smart Scale technology that dynamically scales the extended characters to fit within the device’s preset bounding box. 32-bit Unicode support for CJK font files with extended CMAPs for 32-bit Unicode values. Support for windows bitmap font format FNT/FON and CID-keyed fonts

[edit] Features

  • Lossless Font Compression — Lossless Font Compression: The font engine can read and render industry-standard fonts, bitmap fonts, and outline fonts in a compressed format. The engine has a unique capability of font compression such that each font consumes less memory, and achieving a 2-to-1 compression factor. For example, a unified stroke-based CJK font, with 37,000 characters is under 1MB with optimum compression.
  • CJK Bitmap Font Compression — Font Fusion implements a compression algorithm for CJK bitmap fonts, which ideally compresses the embedded bitmaps and provides a compressed CJK bitmap font support. This font format is Bitstream proprietary compression format for CJK bitmap fonts.
  • Smart Scaling — Smart scaling regulates the adjustment of characters that extend beyond the set height parameters and may get clipped when rendered on small screen devices. The technology ensures that the scaled characters are in proportion to the other characters in the font.
  • Cache Management — Includes a dedicated cache manager to manage the system performance. Uses the cache to store rendered characters (bitmaps).
  • Small footprint — The Font Fusion code size for devices varies from 65 – 187 KB, depending on the configuration chosen.
  • Extraordinary Typographical Quality — Native TrueType hinting produces high-quality output on any device. Additionally, the anti-aliasing techniques, TV/LCD modes improve the glyph output irrespective of the device (a mobile handset or a large digital TV).
  • Low Memory Requirement — Only 16 – 40 KB of RAM required for a Latin font and 27 – 34 KB of RAM required for a stroke based Asian font.
  • Scalable text — Supports high quality scalable text that can be used by mobile and smart phones. The device manufacturers and mobile developers can replace the bitmaps at a single point size with scalable font that can be rendered at different font sizes.

[edit] Language Coverage/Font Support

  • Compact Asian fonts
  • Industry Standard Asian Fonts
  • Cyrillic
  • Greek
  • Arabic (complex scripting language)
  • Hebrew (complex scripting language)
  • Indian (complex scripting languages)
  • Thai (complex scripting language)
  • Over 50 other worldwide languages

[edit] Font Formats Supported

[edit] Applications/Operating Systems Supported

[edit] Devices Supported

Consumer Electronic Devices, Mobile Handset, Set-top box, Digital TV, Printer, Printer Controller, Fax Machine, Multi-function Device, Medical Imaging Device, GPS System, Automobile Display, and other Embedded System

[edit] Software Applications Supported

Web application, Graphics application, Gaming application

[edit] Font Fusion Plug-In for Symbian

Font Fusion plug-in is available for the Symbian OS[2] as a dynamic-link library (DLL)[3]. The plug-in inherits all the features supported by the core Font Fusion engine.

[edit] References

  1. ^ FontFusion_whitepaper.
  2. ^ Bitstream integrates Font Fusion with Symbian OS.
  3. ^ FFSymbian.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links