Packed with features, secure, stable, reliable, lightweight, cross-platform, supports all major scalable font formats, offers the highest quality and fastest output on any device, platform and operating system.

Overview

D-Type Font Engine is a portable C/C++ font engine library for applications that require fast, smooth (anti-aliased), scalable and high-quality text output. D-Type Font Engine supports D-Type, TrueType, OpenType, Type 1, Type 3 and bare CFF fonts and features a robust, reliable, extensive and font format independent API. This library is particularly suitable for all types of applications that require rich font support and crisp and smooth scalable text. In addition, D-Type Font Engine is well suited for both device dependent and device independent text layout and does not require expensive manually hinted fonts with device specific metrics and/or TrueType instructions in order to produce beautiful text output. In fact, D-Type's unique and fully automated built-in font hinting mechanism makes your fonts look better than other font rendering technologies. D-Type Font Engine is suitable for all types of output devices, monitors, LCD and TV screens.

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 (also known as font morphing).

Variable and Multiple-Master Font Support

Excellent font support, advanced hinting and anti-aliasing, unmatched performance, stability and security make D-Type one of the highest quality font engines on the market today. The engine generates exactly the same result, down to the pixel, on any platform your application will run on — whether this is Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android or your own custom embedded system.

Features

Standard Features

• Unsurpassed speed and quality
• Sharp and smooth (anti-aliased) type at any size
• Variable and Multiple-Master font support
• Rotation, 2D/3D transformations and special effects
• Auto-hinting and kerning
• Fractional pixel positioning
• Resolution and device independent but at the same time very suitable for device dependent (optimized) output
• Transparent text (transparency can be specified in percentages)
• Renders to a plethora of device independent memory surface formats (e.g. 8-bpp grayscale, 16-bpp, 24-bpp RGB and various 32-bpp RGBA formats) or Windows compatible Device Context surfaces
• Synthetic font emboldening
• True text outline with custom thickness
• Soft shadows (Gaussian and Fuzzy Blur) and pattern fills
• Full support for D-Type, TrueType, OpenType, Type 1 and bare CFF fonts. Note: 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.
• Partial support for PostScript Type 3 fonts
• Built-in support for UNICODE
• Highly compressed native D-Type font format
• Minimal hardware requirements
• Highly configurable
• D-Type Font Engine (more precisely its font specific drivers) are designed to accept even fonts that are broken or malformed.
• It is possible to open fonts in strict and relaxed processing mode.

Special Features

• D-Type Font Engine is one of the very few font engines with direct support for Variable and Multiple-Master font technology.

• D-Type's font hinting technology is elegant and simple yet advanced and powerful. The final result is extremely fast and high-quality text, whether it's on-screen or in print.

• Unlike TrueType, D-Type hinting technology does not require a significant number of delta hints that must be generated manually for different point sizes. Even better, good D-Type hints can be generated 100% automatically. As a result, non-hinted and poorly hinted TrueType fonts look great when rendered by D-Type. This unique feature cannot be found in any other font technology available today.

• D-Type hints in combination with D-Type's excellent anti-aliasing features produce smooth and beautiful type, completely eliminating pixels and "jaggies". Text is smooth when rotated, but still crisp and legible when displayed at small sizes.

• Memory management is excellent. It is possible to access fonts in many different ways. For example:

  1. the entire font is cached in memory;
  2. only frequently used glyphs are cached in memory;
  3. the entire font resides on disk; just pointers to individual glyphs are stored in memory;
  4. all glyphs are cached in memory but other font data (e.g. metrics, kerning) are accessed directly from a local/remote file;
  5. the entire font is accessed directly from a local/remote file.

  Some of these options make it possible to open hundreds of fonts at the same time even when the amount of memory is very limited.

• D-Type Font Engine has a built-in font validation subsystem. If there is a problem with a font, D-Type can tell you where it is!

Bitmap Compression

Glyph images can be stored in the bitmap cache in a highly compact (compressed) format. This storage format is a proprietary D-Type compression format that is particularly well suited for 8-bpp grayscale bitmaps.

Bitmap compression is extremely fast and effective. When enabled, bitmaps will consume 3-10 times less space in the bitmap cache than non-compressed bitmaps. This is highly recommended when the size of the bitmap cache is small (e.g. in memory constrained environments).

Here is an example:

	A plain 8-bpp grayscale bitmap of the glyph "S". The dimensions of this bitmap are 84 x 108 pixels. Thus, this bitmap will consume 9,072 bytes of storage space in the bitmap cache if stored uncompressed.
	A representation of the compressed grayscale bitmap of the same glyph "S". This compressed bitmap will consume only 1,395 bytes of storage space in the bitmap cache which is about 15% of the original non-compressed size. Thus, by using the bitmap compression we were able to reduce this bitmap's storage requirements by more than 6.5 times!

Specifications

Example 1

Superb anti-aliasing

D-Type Font Engine: Superb anti-aliasing and output quality with up to 256 levels of gray.

Windows GDI: A limited number of gray-levels and a sub-optimal rasterizer will sometimes give you poor output quality, as this image shows.

See our Comparison of D-Type and Other Font Rendering Engines page for more screenshots.

Example 2

Unique automatic font hinting

Auto-hinted Arial

Auto-hinted Times

Our unique automatic font hinting makes text legible as if the corresponding fonts were manually hinted by an experienced typographer. The point, of course, is that labor intensive manual font hinting process can be omitted. Even non-hinted or poorly hinted TrueType fonts will still look great with D-Type. No need to say, our automatic hinting is script independent. It works equally well with Roman, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Indic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and other world's scripts.

Secondly, because our hinting technology preserves original typeface design and metrics, D-Type Font Engine is very suitable for device independent text layout. You are guaranteed to get consistent presentation of text, uniform character spacing and unvarying text lengths regardless of the resolution or zoom factor.

Example 3

A plethora of fonts or just a single variable font?

BASE DESIGN B1=100% B2=0% B3=0% B4=0%	INTERMEDIATE DESIGN B1=67% B2=33% B3=0% B4=0%	INTERMEDIATE DESIGN B1=33% B2=67% B3=0% B4=0%	BASE DESIGN B1=0% B2=100% B3=0% B4=0%
INTERMEDIATE DESIGN B1=67% B2=0% B3=33% B4=0%	INTERMEDIATE DESIGN B1=44% B2=22% B3=22% B4=12%	INTERMEDIATE DESIGN B1=22% B2=44% B3=12% B4=22%	INTERMEDIATE DESIGN B1=0% B2=67% B3=0% B4=33%
INTERMEDIATE DESIGN B1=33% B2=0% B3=67% B4=0%	INTERMEDIATE DESIGN B1=22% B2=12% B3=44% B4=22%	INTERMEDIATE DESIGN B1=12% B2=22% B3=22% B4=44%	INTERMEDIATE DESIGN B1=0% B2=33% B3=0% B4=67%
BASE DESIGN B1=0% B2=0% B3=100% B4=0%	INTERMEDIATE DESIGN B1=0% B2=0% B3=67% B4=33%	INTERMEDIATE DESIGN B1=0% B2=0% B3=33% B4=67%	BASE DESIGN B1=0% B2=0% B3=0% B4=100%

Just a single variable font! The example above shows its 4 base designs and 12 interpolated (intermediate) designs. The contribution percentages of each design are shown as well. D-Type renders interpolated designs quickly and efficiently as any other regular font.

Example 4

Special Style Effects

D-Type excels when it comes to special effects. The above illustration shows only a few possibilities.

Example 5

Kerning

Kerning ON

Kerning OFF

Example 6

Great Looking Text

D-Type Font Engine gives developers many different text output options that are suitable for both device dependent and device independent text layout. No matter which mode you choose, the final result always looks great. Here are a few examples, all rendered by D-Type Font Engine using a 100% auto-hinted version of the popular Verdana font:

This mode is great for device/resolution dependent text layout. Superb text quality and great looking character spacing.

Same as the previous example, but with some filtering.

It's quite remarkable that D-Type can achieve this outstanding quality just by processing raw glyph outlines! All the hinting, grid-fitting, alignment and character spacing calculations in the above examples are done by D-Type Font Engine automatically, without any assistance from TrueType instructions or device-specific metrics. With D-Type, all you need in a font file are good quality glyph outlines and the satisfaction is guaranteed.

See our Comparison of D-Type and Other Font Rendering Engines page for more screenshots or check our D-Type Font Converter page for other benefits D-Type font technology provides.

Screenshots That Demonstrate Rendering Capabilities

Click the thumbnail to see a larger version of the image.

Smooth real-time animation

Text outlines with custom thickness and style

Fractional and whole-pixel positioning

Render very large text without difficulties

Variable and Multiple-Master font support

Special text effects

Text arc

Multiple character spacing options

Text in perspective 1

Text in perspective 2