PRESS RELEASE

Ascender Corp. announces new Asian font format for mobile devices

Elk Grove Village, IL - October 5, 2006 - Ascender Corporation, a leading provider of fonts for hardware & software developers, today announced a new font format specifically for Chinese, Japanese and Korean scripts displayed on consumer electronics and mobile devices. Ascender Compact Asian Fonts™ (ACAF) leverages TrueType® font technology to offer highly legible screen quality with significantly reduced memory requirements.

"The Ascender team has a well-earned reputation for our non-Latin font development expertise, and our ability to make fonts look great on low resolution device screens. We are proud to offer this breakthrough for mobile devices" said Ira Mirochnick, president of Ascender Corporation. "Instead of using non-scalable bitmap fonts, device manufacturers can now obtain the on-screen quality and benefits of TrueType fonts 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 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, such as stroke or stick fonts, the quality of Ascender Compact Asian Fonts is such that no embedded bitmaps are necessary for typical screen sizes.

Mobile devices 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 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. The Ascender Compact Asian Fonts SDK is available to qualified developers by contacting Ascender.

More information on Ascender Unicode-compliant font solutions can be found at http://www.ascendercorp.com/ACAF.html

About Ascender
Ascender® Corporation is a leading provider of advanced font products specializing in type design, font development and licensing. Ascender's founders are font industry experts and have been involved in developing some of the most important and influential fonts used in computers and mobile devices. Ascender provides multilingual, custom font development for a wide range of customers including creative professionals, enterprises and hardware & software developers. Ascender also provides fonts for download to graphic designers and consumers through the Ascender Font Store website.

Contact:
Bill Davis
Ascender Corporation
25 Northwest Point Blvd, Suite 225
Elk Grove Village, IL 60007 USA
Phone: (847) 357 0730 ext. 10
Fax: (847) 357 0731

For more information on this product, please contact us

Ascender is a trademark of Ascender Corporation. OpenType is a trademark of Microsoft Corporation. TrueType is a trademark of Apple Computer Inc. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.

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