Ascender Compact Asian fonts for mobile devices

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Ascender Compact Asian Fonts

Ascender Compact Asian Fonts™ (ACAF) is a new font format specifically for Chinese, Japanese and Korean scripts displayed on consumer electronics and mobile devices. It leverages TrueType® font technology to offer highly legible screen quality with significantly reduced memory requirements.

Ascender Compact Asian Fonts are targeted at any device that requires display of Asian fonts, but with a small memory footprint. This includes mobile phones, PDAs, digital TVs, set-top boxes, and a variety of consumer electronics devices.

Many of these devices currently use bitmap fonts which are limited to one size and style per font file. ACAF is based on scalable font technology, which offers a wide variety of benefits including the ability to enhance User Interfaces with numerous font sizes and styles.

ACAF font sample
GB18030 Simplified Chinese rendered at different sizes

ACAF uses proprietary techniques to render the complex ideographs found in Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK) scripts. By using component outlines, versus entire character outlines, ACAF offers significant benefits over standard TrueType or OpenType® font formats. And unlike other compact font formats, the quality of Ascender Compact Asian Fonts is such that no embedded bitmaps are necessary for typical screen sizes.

Mobile devices with CJK fonts can achieve significant benefits by utilizing Ascender Compact Asian Fonts:

Dramatically reduced font file sizes (over 85% savings)

Flexibility to display fonts at any size from a single master font file

A wide variety of typefaces and font styles to choose from

Ability to tune quality for different screen resolutions and characteristics

A variety of special effects from a basic font

Lower costs for integration and support across multiple platforms

ACAF - variety of typefaces available
A sampling of the wide variety of typefaces to choose from.

ACAF can be implemented in a variety of operating systems popular in today’s mobile, consumer and embedded system devices including WinCE, Symbian, Linux, Nucleus and VxWorks.

Ascender Compact Asian Fonts are part of the Ascender Font System – a platform to compose, layout and render fonts on a variety of devices and systems. ACAF leverages industry standard APIs to provide a modular approach for ease of implementation.

For more information on Ascender Compact Asian Fonts (ACAF), or to request an SDK, please contact us.