Monotype Imaging has introduced new multilingual fonts to meet requirements for scalability, style and legibility on consumer electronics devices such as mobile phones, navigation devices and control panel displays.

WorldType Font Solution

Building on its WorldType brand of products for multilingual development environments, Monotype Imaging has introduced a WorldType font suite that contains readily available fonts in different world scripts. The fonts can be linked with aesthetically compatible fonts based on the WGL character set for European languages.

Monotype Imaging's introductory WorldType font suite, which supports the Bengali, Devanagari, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayam and Tamil Indic scripts in addition to the Arabic, Hebrew and Thai scripts, has been designed to complement many sans serif typeface designs. The Univers and Univers Condensed faces from the Linotype Library are the first to support the multilingual fonts in this WorldType suite.

"In many ways, Univers is an ideal typeface for consumer electronics devices," said Allan Haley, director of words and letters at Monotype Imaging. "Designed in the 1950s by Adrian Frutiger, who's still a contemporary master of typeface design, Univers is able to retain character legibility at small sizes and at modest screen resolutions."

All fonts in the new WorldType suite have been "height restricted" to ensure characters display fully within an em square - the amount of space allotted to each character on small displays such as cell phones. "The fonts have also been vertically aligned, which offers various benefits," said Haley. "Device manufacturers switching from the use of fixed-in-size bitmap fonts, for example, are able to efficiently integrate a scalable solution that performs similarly to bitmaps - characters display fully and predictably along even baselines. Users are able to combine or switch between languages on a device, and every character will appear aligned and in proportion to one another."

Fonts that are part of the new WorldType font suite can also be linked to Monotype Imaging's fonts for East Asian languages that are available in various formats: simple stroke-based, stroke-based enhanced with patent-pending SmartHint technology, East Asian TrueType fonts and the company's new Compact Asian TrueType fonts.