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.

Compact Asian TrueType Fonts

Monotype Imaging has introduced "CATT" fonts which require significantly less memory compared to the same fonts available in the larger-sized TrueType format.

"While traditional TrueType fonts can bring style and aesthetics to devices that support high-resolutions screens, these fonts can overburden memory-restricted devices," said Steve Martin, vice president of engineering at Monotype Imaging. "Our challenge has been to open the door to increased style and selection that TrueType fonts offer - but without taxing memory. Our new CATT fonts answer this challenge." Monotype Imaging's CATT-enhanced CSong Light Simplified Chinese font, for example, which complies with the GB 18030 Chinese character set standard, is 21 percent the size of its regular TrueType version, a reduction of 7.7 MB.

In addition to the CSong font, Monotype Imaging offers CATT-enhanced MHei and MKai GB 18030-compliant Simplified Chinese fonts, MHei and MKai Traditional Chinese fonts that comply to the Big5-HKSCS Chinese character set standard, TB Gothic and Heisei Gothic Japanese fonts based on the JIS X 0208 and JIS X 0213 character sets respectively, and the MT Hangul Gothic Korean typeface, based on the KSCx1001 character set. Additional TrueType fonts will be CATT-enhanced based on market demand.

Monotype Imaging's new multilingual font solutions work with the company's iType font engine, a scalable subsystem that enables OEMs and developers to build products that clearly display characters based on outline or stroke font data, and Monotype Imaging's WorldType Layout Engine, which works with the iType font engine to compose, position and render multilingual text. In addition to Monotype Imaging's new WorldType and CATT font solutions, the company today announced version 4.0 of its iType font engine and version 3.0 of its WorldType Layout Engine, respectively.