D-Type Unicode Text Module

A powerful, compact, feature-rich and remarkably simple-to-use module to lay out, render and edit Unicode text.

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D-Type Unicode Text Module is a portable C/C++ library for laying out, rendering and editing Unicode text. It is designed to be powerful, fast, flexible, elegant and, above all, extremely easy to use. With only a few key functions, it allows application developers to easily create, format, lay out and render high-quality text in virtually any Unicode script and language, while also handling cursor positioning, selection highlighting, and text editing.

D-Type Unicode Text Module is a module for D-Type PowerDoc Engine. Aside from D-Type PowerDoc Engine and its dependencies, this module does not require any other third-party libraries or fonts to function properly.

Features

Text layout and rendering that incorporates advanced styling and formatting, bidirectional text support, font handling, various Unicode algorithms, contextual shaping, cursor handling, selection highlighting and automatic text flow is a very complex task. Most programmers lack the necessary skills, knowledge, know-how and time to develop and maintain their own text composition engines. D-Type Unicode Text Module is currently the only product of this kind available on the market. No other library can easily match the performance, quality, flexibility, portability, reliability, technical elegance and simplicity of D-Type Unicode Text Module.

General

• Super fast. Written in industry-standard C++.
• Scalable vector-based text output. Text can be zoomed in/out and smoothly displayed at any size or screen resolution.
• Ultra-high quality rendering with anti-aliasing and sub-pixel precision.
• Available for any platform. Immediately deployable on Windows, Linux and macOS.
• Produces identical results on all platforms.
• Comes with a basic set of Unicode fonts. Supports all industry-standard font formats (TrueType, OpenType, Type 1, CFF, D-Type).

Layout and Formatting

• Implicit bidirectional analysis and reordering.
• Support for left-to-right scripts and right-to-left scripts such as Arabic or Hebrew.
• Automatically handles cursor positioning and movement, selection highlighting and text editing.
• Automatically displays selection highlights.
• A rich set of text styling/formatting attributes (bold, italic, underline, outline, strike-out, superscript, subscript, compression, expansion, soft shadows, blur, emboss, glow, transparency, custom defined styles).
• Standard text layout capabilities (e.g. letter and line spacing, kerning, justification etc).
• Vertical text justification (top, middle, bottom, justified).
• Advanced typography and shaping for complex scripts (e.g. Arabic, Thai, Indic).
• Advanced text rendering algorithms for enhanced glyph positioning and text legibility.

Advanced

• Support for standard hyphenation. This results in better text wrapping behavior and more professionally justified text, especially when displayed in narrow columns. Out of the box, D-Type Unicode Text Module ships with hyphenation dictionaries for English, French, German, Spanish and 20 other languages. Support for additional (custom) hyphenation dictionaries can be easily configured.
• Automatic text flow across multiple linked textflow areas.
• A full 3×3 transformation matrix can be applied to any textflow area independently. This includes 2D perspective transformations and affine transformations such as scaling, skewing, rotation.
• Support for both horizontal and vertical writing direction with either horizontal or vertical glyph orientation.
• Horizontal and Vertical text writing progression. Sixteen different types of text progression are supported (e.g. Left-to-Right & Top-to-Bottom, Top-to-Bottom & Left-to-Right, Top-to-Bottom & Right-to-Left etc.)
• When mixing left-to-right and right-to-left text, the user can choose bidirectional reordering or bidirectional rotation. Bidirectional reordering is effective in the horizontal and vertical writing modes. Bidirectional rotation works well in the vertical writing mode.

Key Specifications

Screenshots

Here are a few screenshots that show D-Type Unicode Text Module in action.