D-Type Rendering Technology

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D-Type Font Engine
The next generation scalable font technology

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).

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

Special Features

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 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 glyph S 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

Supported Font Formats
  • D-Type
  • TrueType and TrueType Collections
  • OpenType (TrueType Outlines)
  • OpenType (Type 2/CFF Outlines)
  • Adobe Type 1
  • Bare CFF
  • PostScript Type 3

Note 1: D-Type Font Engine supports both WOFF 1.0 ans WOFF 2.0 packaging of TrueType and OpenType fonts and font collections.

Note 2: 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).

Note 3: 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.

Character Encoding Standards
  • UNICODE
  • ANSI
Transformations and Special Effects
  • Rotation
  • Horizontal/Vertical Compression
  • Horizontal/Vertical Mirror
  • Horizontal/Vertical Skew
  • Outline and Dilatation (font emboldening)
  • Transparency, Shadow (Blur), Emboss, Shades and Patterns
  • Soft Shadow (Blur) and Glow
  • Emboss
  • Pattern Fills
Advanced Features
  • Kerning
  • Auto-hinting
  • Masking
  • Rendering to a variety of surface formats (8-bpp, 16-bpp RGB, 24-bpp RGB, 32-bpp RGB, RGBA, ARGB etc.)
  • A plethora of style effects including blur, shadow, pattern fill, emboss, shading effects etc.
Grayscale Levels
  • Up to 256, fully customizable
Availability
  • Windows
  • Linux
  • macOS
  • iOS
  • Android
  • Windows Phone
  • Windows RT
  • XBox
  • Raspberry Pi
  • Zealz GK802 Mini PC
  • Custom builds for virtually any other platform (32-bit and/or 64-bit)

Example 1

Superb anti-aliasing

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?

A
BASE
DESIGN

B1=100%
B2=0%
B3=0%
B4=0%
A
INTERMEDIATE
DESIGN

B1=67%
B2=33%
B3=0%
B4=0%
A
INTERMEDIATE
DESIGN

B1=33%
B2=67%
B3=0%
B4=0%
A
BASE
DESIGN

B1=0%
B2=100%
B3=0%
B4=0%
A
INTERMEDIATE
DESIGN

B1=67%
B2=0%
B3=33%
B4=0%
A
INTERMEDIATE
DESIGN

B1=44%
B2=22%
B3=22%
B4=12%
A
INTERMEDIATE
DESIGN

B1=22%
B2=44%
B3=12%
B4=22%
A
INTERMEDIATE
DESIGN

B1=0%
B2=67%
B3=0%
B4=33%
A
INTERMEDIATE
DESIGN

B1=33%
B2=0%
B3=67%
B4=0%
A
INTERMEDIATE
DESIGN

B1=22%
B2=12%
B3=44%
B4=22%
A
INTERMEDIATE
DESIGN

B1=12%
B2=22%
B3=22%
B4=44%
A
INTERMEDIATE
DESIGN

B1=0%
B2=33%
B3=0%
B4=67%
A
BASE
DESIGN

B1=0%
B2=0%
B3=100%
B4=0%
A
INTERMEDIATE
DESIGN

B1=0%
B2=0%
B3=67%
B4=33%
A
INTERMEDIATE
DESIGN

B1=0%
B2=0%
B3=33%
B4=67%
A
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:

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