DigiType Compact Asian
Monotype Imaging is proud to offer DigiType™ Compact Asian version 2.0 - a font format and technology specifically for Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK) scripts displayed on consumer electronics and mobile devices.
DigiType Compact Asian version 2.0 was developed by DynaComware, a leading developer of Asian fonts, and Ascender Corp. The two companies have worked together to improve the screen quality of East Asian fonts with significantly reduced memory requirements.
DigiType Compact Asian is targeted at any device that requires display of East Asian fonts, but with a small memory footprint. This includes mobile phones, PDAs, digital TVs, set-top boxes, game consoles, GPS units 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. DigiType Compact Asian 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.
Enhanced Legibility
The images below show the difference between an antialiased unhinted font (line 1) and the DigiType Compact Asian hinted font (line 2). There are noticeable improvements made to the glyphs on the 2nd line (marked in orange). In some cases DigiType Compact Asian hinting reduces the number of strokes for clarity without changing the meaning of the ideograph. The result is text quality similar to that of hand tuned bit maps.
Mobile devices with CJK fonts can achieve significant benefits by utilizing DigiType Compact Asian fonts:
- Dramatically reduced font file sizes (over 85% savings)
- Better screen quality at small sizes and when scaled to large sizes compared to alternative solutions in the market
- Flexibility to display fonts at any size
- 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
A sampling of the wide variety of typefaces to choose from.
View PDF with Compact Asian Font Samples.
The DigiType Compact Asian solution has been enabled on Windows CE and the Android platform, and is available to developers seeking to reduce the file size of Asian fonts while still providing excellent screen legibility and performance on mobile handsets.
DigiType Compact Asian uses proprietary techniques to render the complex ideographs found in Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese and Korean scripts. By using component outlines, versus entire character outlines, DigiType Compact Asian offers significant benefits over standard TrueType or OpenType font formats. And unlike other compact font formats, the quality of DigiType Compact Asian is such that no embedded bitmaps are necessary for typical screen sizes.
DigiType Compact Asian version 2.0 introduces advanced hinting which enables stroke reduction at small sizes to improve the quality on screen while maintaining the integrity and meaning of East Asian characters. This allows fonts to look superior at both small sizes down to 12 PPEM (Points Per Em) and at larger sizes.
DigiType Compact Asian leverages industry standard APIs to provide a modular approach for ease of implementation, including support for the FreeType font engine. DigiType Compact Asian can be implemented in a variety of operating systems popular in today’s mobile, consumer and embedded system devices including Android, Linux, Symbian, WinCE and others.
DigiType Compact Asian is offered by both DynaComware in the Asian market and Monotype Imaging in United States and Europe. For more information on DigiType Compact Asian, or to request an SDK, please contact us.
DigiType is a trademark of DynaComware and may be registered in certain jurisdictions.
