Fonts Meet Chinese-Mandated Standards for Language-Related Products. Mortsel, Belgium – May 22, 2002 – Agfa Monotype Corporation announced that two Chinese-based standards groups - the Committee on Information Technology Standards (CITS) and the State Language Committee (SLC) - have approved two Agfa Monotype multilingual fonts for distribution within the People's Republic of China (PRC). The two Chinese fonts, Hei Bold and Sung Light, are from Agfa Monotype's WorldType(r) multilingual font library and include full support for the Chinese character set standard, GB 18030. The PRC government requires that any language-related software applications introduced into the Chinese marketplace support all characters in the GB 18030 standard according to PRC guidelines. The CITS and SLC have been chartered by the PRC government to ensure product compliance. "With full compliance and all the necessary language support for China, these fonts provide an ideal and easy solution for software and hardware developers looking to introduce new products into the Chinese marketplace," said Brian Kraimer, vice president of Agfa Monotype. "We're in the unique position of having extensive experience working with GB 18030. We also have strong, well-established relationships with both the CITS and SLC. We're now working toward the approval of more fonts from our WorldType library." In 2000, the GB 18030 Chinese character-encoding standard was introduced into the Unicode(r) world wide character-encoding standard. GB stands for Guojia Biaozhun, Chinese for "national standard." GB 18030 can contain up to 1.6 million characters supporting one, two or four-byte characters. Languages include Mongolian, Tibetan, Yi and Uyghur. Chinese scripts are also supported. In 1995, Agfa Monotype was the first font company to have its Chinese typefaces endorsed by the PRC government - years before GB 18030 was established. IBM is the first major software company to license Hei Bold and Sung Light for use in variety of products to be sold in the PRC. WorldType Agfa Monotype's WorldType font library provides a complete, flexible approach to software and hardware developers creating multilingual Unicode-compliant fonts. WorldType fonts enable developers to support a range of languages using single or multiple fonts. The library is one of the world's most extensive collections that supports non-Latin and extended-Latin scripts. More information about Agfa Monotype's WorldType and Unicode-compliant fonts supporting GB 18030 can be obtained by sending an e-mail to [email protected].