Bitmap Fonts

Our selection of bitmap fonts provide the highest quality text achievable on television screens and low-resolution displays.

Targeted at text generation systems for products in such progressive markets as interactive television and wireless communications, our bitmaps can be generated at any cell size and resolution.

Building on 30 years of experience in typography, we offer bitmap fonts for all applications, configurations and language requirements. With us, you can choose fonts from the largest typeface library in the world and subset them to specified character sets.

In addition to standard bitmap fonts, we can produce grayscale bitmaps. Grayscale bitmaps eliminate rough edges and improve legibility and readability at all sizes. Our grayscale bitmaps are available in 4,8,16... to 256 colors.

Benefits Include:

Flexibility to render fonts to any cell size for accommodating multiple screen resolutions

Support for Latin and Non-Latin typefaces to satisfy multiple language requirements

Well defined format specification to facilitate integration and format conversion

Large library of typefaces

Configurable character sets to reduce memory requirements

High quality grayscaling for crisper, sharper, more readable text

Some display systems are better than others at exhibiting realistic images or showing fine details in complex shapes. For example, characters displayed on NTSC or PAL televisions are difficult to read at lower resolutions.

The effective resolution of NTSC is on the order of 320 by 240. Because fonts are digitally imaged and must be converted via a scan process to an analog format, quality suffers when there are rapid transitions of white to black or black to white. There is a limit in NTSC of both the luminance signal bandwidth and the chroma (color) bandwidth. Possible negative artifacts evident under these conditions include: (1) “stair stepping”, where there is noticeable jaggedness in the pixel transitions and (2) color “bleeding” where the underlying system cannot track the required color transitions quickly enough.

To solve these problems, we apply a technique known as anti-aliasing or grayscale. Grayscale bitmaps are designed by turning pixels on at certain intensities to create the illusion of a smoother curve and controlled letter spacing techniques. By definition, grayscale means shades of gray with no color, but in our terminology, grayscale refers to both true grayscale as well as graduated colors. For example, grayscaling may be used to show a smooth rendering of a character which has a blue foreground and white background. Grayscaling may also be used to compensate for the lack of pixel resolution by using color depth.

Our high quality bitmap fonts are the result of skilled typographers and a sophisticated tool set. With the largest typeface library in the world and the flexibility to create bitmap fonts at any cell size or resolution, we provide a complete font solution to emerging markets.