Las Vegas, Nevada, Agfa Monotype Corporation, a leading provider of fonts and font technologies, today announced the release of iType, a highly compact, extremely portable font scaling technology. Designed particularly for smart Internet devices, iType gives OEMs the industry's fastest, highest quality solution for developing products that generate text for on-screen display. In addition to intelligent Internet devices, Agfa Monotype's latest high-performance embedded font technology is suitable for memory-constraint environments such as those in set-top boxes for home television sets, information appliances and cell phones. With iType, OEMs benefit by offering products that quickly display text that is exceptionally readable and crisp. "Agfa Monotype is known worldwide for delivering quality type and type technology," said Doug Shaw, senior vice president of the OEM business unit for Agfa Monotype. "We designed iType to be extremely fast and efficient to satisfy the requirements of intelligent Internet devices. The package also includes a diverse set of fonts to meet our customers' needs for flexibility and first-rate display quality." iType is available as an SDK (Software Developers Kit) and includes two main components: the font rasterization software and a suite of fonts. The rasterization software is a compact 60Kb (approximate size when compiled on a PentiumÆ processor) with character generation speeds of more than 5,000 characters per second (based on tests using the font, Arial, at 25 lines per em on a 233MHz Pentium II processor with 256Kb of RAM, cache turned off). The rasterization software is delivered as ANSI C source code for use on any standard ANSI C compiler. Platform support includes, but is not limited to, Windows,Æ UNIXÆ and LinuxÅ operating systems. The fonts include a Windows-compatible core set of 12 fonts, two Japanese gothic fonts and a collection of 12 Agfa Monotype screen fonts specifically designed for low-resolution displays. iType also supports any standard TrueTypeÆ or TrueType collection font (for double-byte or non-Latin character support). iType provides OEMs scalable font technology to generate characters at virtually any point size. In addition, international language support allows OEMs to localize products for individual languages. Other product features include embedded bitmap font support to enhance screen quality at smaller point sizes, character caching to improve character generation performance, concurrent disk/ROM support to dynamically store additional fonts, and output support for bitmaps, outlines and graymaps to meet requirements for a variety of display types.