the company says.
According to Agfa Monotype, its ARIB scalable font package features three designs: square gothic, round gothic and bold round gothic. All are stroke-based fonts, built not only to meet minimal storage and memory requirements but also to ensure the highest level of display quality and readability. The fonts support Kanji, Hiragana and Katakana scripts and are constructed of simple, composite shapes that are used repeatedly to build complex Japanese characters, which can add up to more than 7,000 in a single font. The ARIB fonts require approximately 1.5 megabytes of memory or storage, a reduction of more than 80 percent when compared to the use of bitmaps rather than stroke-based fonts.
The ARIB fonts are part of a complete text rendering package which features iType, Agfa Monotypes font engine that has been implemented in millions of consumer electronics devices worldwide. Based on TrueType and OpenType industry-standard font formats, iType allows for the rapid generation of scalable characters at virtually any size, whether characters are written horizontally or vertically.
The ARIB solution is the second pre-packaged font set from Agfa Monotype that provides digital television and set-top box manufacturers with text and display capabilities that adhere to an industry standard. In the United States, digital TV systems are now required to support specific font designs and font effects as outlined in the FCC-mandated EIA-708B (Electronics Industries Alliance) specification for closed caption text display. Agfa Monotypes closed caption font collection, in conjunction with iType, meets all EIA-708B requirements for closed caption display, including font designs, character sizes, font effects such as outline and drop shadow, font styles such as underlining and italicizing, and character offsetting such as the display of superscripts and subscripts.
Agfa Monotype says it also offers fonts and font technologies that fully comply with specifications published by other industry standards bodies including Unicode, DVB (Digital Video Broadcasting Project) and W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). In addition, the company says its MicroType Express lossless compression technology has been adopted as the font compression technology in the ISO/IEC (International Organization for Standardization / International Electrotechnical Commission) 14496 (MPEG-4) specification.
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