WILMINGTON, Mass.- Sept. 5, 2001--Agfa Monotype Corporation today announced that Microsoft Corp. has entered into a long-term, worldwide agreement to license Agfa Monotype's patented Asian Compression for TrueType(tm) (ACT(tm)), a lossless compression technology for Asian TrueType(r) fonts. ACT will be integrated into "Talisker,'' code name for the next version of Windows CE, Microsoft's embedded real-time operating system for building smart mobile devices. "We are extremely pleased with Microsoft's decision,'' said Doug Shaw, senior vice president of Agfa Monotype's OEM business unit. "With ACT, 'Talisker' developers will be able to quickly and easily introduce feature-rich, compact, intelligent devices to rapidly growing Asian markets.'' "Talisker'' is ideally suited for developers of memory-constrained devices such as smart phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs) and web appliances. With real-time support, rich multimedia capabilities, enhanced Internet functions and advanced application services, "Talisker'' effectively combines the flexibility of an embedded platform with the power of Windows and the web. By integrating ACT, developers will be able to take advantage of a host of benefits while delivering solutions requiring full Asian language support, despite inherent memory limitations. "As OEMs begin developing their Windows-powered devices on smaller form factors, the ability to incorporate a small footprint, yet functionally rich operating system becomes increasingly important,'' said Keith White, senior director of the Embedded and Appliance Platforms Group at Microsoft. "The inclusion of Agfa Monotype's font compression technology in 'Talisker' will help enable embedded developers to quickly bring to market these small-footprint, smart mobile devices.'' Asian Compression for TrueType (ACT) ACT will provide "Talisker'' the ability to support Chinese, Japanese and Korean TrueType fonts within the smallest of footprints -- extremely important since Asian fonts typically contain thousands of characters. With ACT, compression is achieved up to 70 percent, providing much-needed ROM savings in memory-constrained environments. ACT is also a lossless technology, meaning no loss of data -- or display quality -- when characters are decompressed. In addition, ACT improves performance by decompressing characters only when needed. Although developed for Asian fonts, ACT is suitable for other large Latin and non-Latin fonts, such as the growing number of Unicode(r)-compliant fonts, which hold up to 65,000 characters in a single font.