Cambridge, MA — (press release excerpt) — Bitstream Inc. today announced the beta release of btX2, Bitstream's font rendering solution for Linux-based digital TV and embedded systems.

btX2 is a FreeType driver that provides access to Bitstream's Font Fusion font technology. btX2 allows developers to use the same function calls as FreeType. btX2 supports Unicode encoding and can render international fonts. btX2 is able to render eight font formats, including compact PFRs as well as compact Asian stroke-based fonts, that can fit in embedded Linux systems and interactive TV devices, where space and memory are at a premium. btX2 also has a TV mode that allows developers to fine tune the output on the screen. With its support for Unicode and international fonts, btX2 provides small, fast font technology for Linux developers.

Besides rendering industry-standard TrueType, Type 1, and PFR font formats, btX2 lets developers render very compact Asian fonts in stroke-based format. Stroke-based fonts replace a large unmanageable font with a compact manageable one. With stroke-based fonts, developers can scale characters to any size, use one font for all weights and styles, from light to bold, and include all the characters in the font without having to subset it. Stroke-based fonts and btX2 provide a high-end font engine that can fine-tune output for computer monitors, TV screens, and LCD displays. Developers can use the native TV mode that Font Fusion offers to optimize the output on television screens.

Bitstream also lets developers create their own portable font resources (PFRs). The PFR is a compact, platform independent format for representing high-quality characters from scalable fonts. The Bitstream PFR font format is open, public, and an industry standard. The Bitstream PFR is the standard font format for digital TV. Many independent organizations responsible for setting digital TV standards have adopted the PFR font format as their de facto, standard font format for digital TV . . .

• ATSC (Advanced Television Systems Committee), which approved the DTV Application Software Environment (DASE) standard. The DASE standard calls out the ISO standard for fonts, which is the PFR
• DAVIC (Digital Audio Visual Council), which set multimedia standards for international broadcasting
• DTG (Digital TV Group), which coordinates standards for Digital TV broadcasting in the United Kingdom
• DVB (Digital Video Broadcasting), a Swiss-based industry organization representing one standard for digital TV, which has been adopted extensively in Europe
• MHP (Multimedia Home Platform), which many European set-top box and digital TV manufacturers are using as their standard development platform
• ISO/IEC 16500-6:1999 (International Organization for Standardization/International Electrotechnical Commission), which together form the specialized system for worldwide standardization
• OCAP (OpenCable Application Platform), which supports the DVB-MHP standard, including support for PFRs

In addition, the beta release of btX2 includes a core set of 13 delta-hinted, TrueType screen fonts. Delta hinting involves fine-tuning fonts so that they look good on the screen, even at small point sizes on low-resolution devices, such as computer monitors. The core set of delta-hinted fonts shipped with btX2 includes Courier 10 (roman, italic, bold, and bold italic), Dutch 801 (roman, italic, bold, and bold italic), Swiss 721 (roman, italic, bold, and bold italic), and Symbol Set.

About Font Fusion

Font Fusion provides developers with full font fidelity and high-quality typographic output at any resolution on any device, while maintaining the integrity of the original character shapes. Font Fusion is small and fast. Most developers can compile the source code in 32-105 KB, depending on options. It generates more than 16,000 characters per second, using the Arial font at 25 lines per em on a 233MHz Pentium II processor, cache turned off.

Font Fusion performs well in memory- and performance-constrained environments. For example, a complete traditional Chinese TrueType font with more than 13,000 characters can occupy as much as 8MB. With Font Fusion, the same characters occupy less than 0.5MB, representing considerable savings in memory and disk space costs.

Font Fusion is designed for operating systems, software applications, Web applications, low-resolution screen devices, multimedia servers, high-definition television screens (HDTVs), set-top boxes, continuous tone printers, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and other embedded systems and information and wireless appliances.

 
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