WILMINGTON, Mass.--Nov. 5, 2001--Agfa Monotype Corporation today announced that Vital Source Technologies, Inc., a major provider of integrated curriculum programs for graduate health sciences schools, has licensed two customized Agfa Monotype fonts for its e-book reading software product. The fonts are now part of Vital Source's VitalBook(TM) custom curriculum courseware. The customized fonts, developed as Unicode-compliant serif and sans serif designs, include multilingual and scientific characters to support specialized text used in dental and medical textbooks. In addition, because of the low-resolution display of e-book readers, the fonts have been designed with high-quality TrueType hinting for optimal on-screen legibility. "It was a delight to work with Agfa Monotype to develop this product under such a tight deadline,'' said Rick Johnson, chief technical officer at Vital Source. "We can now say that one out of every six incoming dental students in the country is using Agfa Monotype fonts to view our product.'' Vital Source has converted data from over 250 health science textbooks, notes, slides, syllabi and other course material for viewing on e-book readers. "Publishers have a variety of challenges when it comes to changing from paper to electronic media,'' said Bill Davis, vice president of business development at Agfa Monotype. "Starting with our Enhanced Screen Quality(TM) fonts for low-resolution screens and our multilingual WorldType library, we're able to supply publishers and developers with customizable character sets with on-screen clarity at any resolution. For e-book publishers, we also offer affordable font licenses for either custom or off-the-shelf fonts.'' WorldType Agfa Monotype's WorldType serves an increasingly global landscape of communication, enabling developers to support a wide range of languages using a single font or multiple fonts. The technology provides flexibility to subdivide large fonts into smaller, more manageable modules modeled on linguistic, regional or other specialized needs. WorldType is based on Unicode, a worldwide character-encoding standard designed to enable the global interchange of multilingual digital information. World Renowned Font Library -- High Quality Font Technology Agfa Monotype's font library is one of the most comprehensive in the world with over 7,000 fonts. Viewed as a long-time staple in the advertising and publishing industries, the library includes such well-known and popular typefaces as Arial, Gill Sans and Times New Roman. To meet the particular needs of e-book publishers and other manufacturers of digital communication devices, hundreds of TrueType fonts from Agfa Monotype's extensive library are now available as Enhanced Screen Quality(TM) (ESQ(TM)) fonts. ESQ fonts have been fine-tuned with special hinting technology to ensure the highest level of clarity for display on computer monitors and other low-resolution devices.