East Asian Stroke Font Set

For East Asian Languages: Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese

With Monotype Imaging’s stroke-based fonts, East Asian scripts containing thousands of characters are no longer barriers for OEMs building memory-constrained devices.

Traditional Asian TrueType® fonts require megabytes of storage – too much for most memory-restricted or low-resolution devices. Yet, storage requirements can be reduced 90 percent or more using our stroke-based fonts. For example, a standard GB 2312 Simplified Chinese TrueType font with 7,663 characters is about 2.7 MB. Our stroke font equivalent is under 250 KB. Cell phones, set-top boxes, PDAs, most other wireless devices and even operating systems benefit from stroke-based fonts.

Technology Behind the Fonts
Our fully scalable stroke-based fonts consist of composite strokes or ‘graphemes.’ These simple shapes appear as pen strokes or lines and are used repeatedly to build complex East Asian characters. Graphemes offer huge storage savings. The same graphemes are used to construct various characters that can add up to thousands in a single font. Another major advantage lies in the technology’s simplicity: less than half the number of points are needed to render characters – much less than building characters using traditional outlines where points are located on the edges of shapes rather than at the centerlines. The technology includes support for both native and Unicode™ encodings and are available for Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Japanese and Korean scripts.

Outline characters – Points that describe the character are along the edge. The font engine must define the edge and then fill in during rendering. For operating systems where large file sizes are acceptable, East Asian typefaces have traditionally been designed as outline fonts.

Stroke-based characters – Points are placed along the center line. Less than half the points are needed to render characters, improving character-generation performance. With the added help of graphemes, significant savings are realized in memory or disk space requirements. Monotype Imaging offers SmartHint® fonts for Japanese, Chinese and Korean languages. SmartHint technology is a patent-pending Monotype Imaging innovation that enables the clear display of scalable East Asian text.

Graphemes

The same graphemes are used to build various characters, minimizing memory or disk space. All elements combine to create pleasing, easy-to-read characters that are rendered on-the-fly.

Small Size, Superior Display Quality
Our stroke-based fonts ensure superior display quality and scalability for an unlimited number of output resolutions. Using simple designs that eliminate unnecessary character attributes that can hinder readability, our stroke-based fonts are exceptionally easy to read.

Flexibility
Monotype Imaging’s iType® font engine effects can be used to produce multiple weights – without the requirement of additional fonts. The technology includes both native and standard Unicode encodings. As is true for all other iType fonts, our stroke-based fonts can be rendered as bitmaps (single bit) or graymaps (2, 4 or 8 bit), outlines or strokes.

East Asian stroke-based font samples

Simplified Chinese

Traditional Chinese

Japanese

Korean

Sampling of features and benefits of East Asian stroke-based fonts

Features

Benefits

Minimal file sizes

Compared to TrueType outlines, storage savings can surpass 90 percent.

Superior display quality

Simple designs ensure easy character recognition.

Scalability to any size

To accommodate various display sizes, scalability eliminates the need for multiple bitmaps (which cannot be scaled).

Adjustable stroke widths

Light, medium and bold weights are easily achieved by simply adjusting stroke widths within the font.

Native and Unicode encodings

Stroke-based fonts are delivered with the appropriate encoding to meet specific OEM requirements.

Embedded bitmap support

Smaller sizes or custom characters can be integrated as hand-tuned bitmaps – ensuring crisp readability at any size.