Font Engines - Font Rendering Technology

Ascender offers developers two font engines for their software or hardware products to use for rendering fonts to display type on screen:

The Microsoft Font Rasterizer has earned a reputation as the high quality leader, and offers support for patented TrueType® hinting not available in open source alternatives.

The FreeType Font Engine is a popular open source system that is a good choice for less demanding applications.

These font engines are part of the Ascender Font System -- a comprehensive set of components to layout and render multilingual type on devices ranging from mobile phones to digital TVs. For consumer electronics devices that require CJK fonts with the smallest memory footprint, Ascender Compact Asian Fonts is available. The Ascender Font System was developed to use standard font rendering calls to make it easier for developers to plug in different font engines.

Contact us to learn more about Font Engines and how Ascender can help you with font rendering systems in various devices.