This document provides technical information about D-Type Standard Engine and describes its Application Programming Interface (API).
D-Type Standard Engine consists of the following two sub-engines:
D-Type Font Engine, a high-performance resolution independent font engine for applications that require fast, sharp, high-quality and smooth (anti-aliased) text output.
D-Type Shape Engine, an ultra-fast rendering engine for smooth (anti-aliased), scalable vector-based graphics.
Both D-Type Font Engine and D-Type Shape Engine rely on D-Type Grasycale Rasterizer (or simply D-Type Rasterizer) for rendering text, individual glyphs and custom shapes.
D-Type Font Engine supports D-Type (.dtf), TrueType (.ttf), OpenType (.otf), TrueType and OpenType Collections (.ttc, .otc), Adobe Type 1 (.pfb or .pfa), PostScript Type 3 (.ps) and Bare CFF (.cff) font format.
D-Type Font Engine provides direct support for multiple-master and OpenType variable font technology (with either TrueType or CFF2 outlines). This technology allows two or more outline fonts, or base designs, to be incorporated into a single font file. Applications can create hundreds or thousands of additional font instances, or intermediate designs, from the base designs by applying D-Type's unique real-time interpolation capabilities.
D-Type Font Engine supports both WOFF 1.0 ans WOFF 2.0 packaging of TrueType and OpenType fonts and font collections.
D-Type Font Engine supports OpenType fonts with color glyph layers (a special COLR table and a supplementary CPAL table) as well as OpenType bitmap glyph images (the sbix table with embedded PNG and/or JPEG images).
D-Type text can be drawn at any size, stretched, mirrored, compressed, rotated, skewed, outlined or using any combination of these effects.
D-Type Font Engine does not support TrueType bytecode (aka TrueType instructions) but uses its own font hinting technology to enhance the display of fonts. Specifically, D-Type Font Engine has advanced and sophisticated anti-aliasing and hinting algorithms for enhanced screen quality and maximum text legibility. In addition, D-Type's revolutionary auto-hinting algorithms virtually eliminate the need for manual font hinting.
D-Type's excellent anti-aliasing capabilities provide support for up to 256 levels of gray (or other colors). Unlike some popular graphics packages that generate gray-levels simply by downsampling a larger black and white bitmap, D-Type generates gray-levels during the rasterization process itself. This is an extremely fast process, which results in superior quality and enhanced screen resolution.
If required, D-Type's gray-scale levels can be customized in order to compensate for monitor gamma or reduce the number of colors used in the rasterization process. This feature is particularly useful when the total number of available colors is limited. For example, by utilizing only 8 or 16 different intensities of gray (or other colors), the 256-color display systems will use colors in a more effective way.
D-Type Shape Engine can be used to generate anti-aliased shapes of absolutely amazing screen quality. D-Type Shape Engine comes with a library of the most common shapes, which includes lines, circles, ellipses, rectangles, rounded rectangles, polygons etc. In addition, applications can get direct access to D-Type Rasterizer and render any shape.
Any of the shapes above can be drawn filled or stroked, with a custom line width.
D-Type Rasterizer supports both the Odd-Even and Nonzero Winding Number rule.
Both D-Type Font Engine and D-Type Shape Engine can draw to memory (off-screen) surfaces supplied by your application. This includes 8-bit grayscale and 16-bit, 24-bit or 32-bit RGB surfaces. This type of rendering is platform independent, extremely fast and very suitable for real-time animations. In addition, an application can access and manipulate surface's bytes directly.
When drawing to memory surfaces, text and shapes can be drawn anti-aliased and transparent (with a custom transparency factor) against any background.
Since D-Type Font Engine and D-Type Shape Engine do not make use of global variables, both libraries can be used in a thread-safe manner. This means an application can initialize multiple instances of D-Type engine and access D-Type functions simultaneously.
Both D-Type Font Engine and D-Type Shape Engine support many advanced features such as fractional positioning, blurring, pattern fills, embossing, fast true color RGB rendering, alpha channels etc.
On the Windows platform, D-Type Font Engine and D-Type Rasterizer can also draw to a Windows compatible Device Context. This includes screen, windows, printers, off-screen bitmaps etc.