February 01, 2006

By: Shawnee McRoberts
Website: http://www.1st-in-cell-phones.com

Agfa Monotype Licenses Fonts and iType Font Engine to Motorola

Technologies to be Embedded in Cell Phones for the Chinese Mobile Marketplace.

Agfa Monotype Corp., a major supplier of fonts and font technologies worldwide, has licensed a Chinese font with Latin support and the company's iType® font engine to Motorola Inc. (NYSE: MOT), a global provider of wireless communication products. The font and font subsystem will be integrated in Motorola cell phones that display Chinese text.

"Our alliance with Motorola, one of the industry's most recognized leaders, underscores our commitment to provide fonts and technologies designed for memory-constrained devices such as cell phones," said Steve Kuhlman, vice president and general manager of Agfa Monotype's Digital Imaging group. "Companies such as Motorola that develop wireless devices can now benefit from our tailored offerings. Technologies are small in code size, unlimited in language support, fast in rendering speed, flexible in supporting various screen parameters, and superior in display quality."

"Motorola is a leading supplier of mobile phones worldwide," said Mala Chandra, vice president of software applications and architecture at Motorola's Personal Communications Sector. "Mobile phones have given people a new-found personal power, enabling unprecedented mobility and allowing them to conduct their business wherever they go. As a font company with unparalleled expertise in supporting the world's languages, Agfa Monotype is able to meet our requirements for quality, performance and language support."

Motorola has licensed a customized Chinese font with calligraphic characteristics. The font contains a Latin subset for text transmissions when communicating in North American or Western European languages. By using this single scalable font, Motorola can take advantage of reduced memory benefits that are not available with bitmapped font data. Bitmapped fonts can't be scaled and therefore require several versions of the same font to accommodate various text sizes. Memory capacity is typically limited in devices such as cell phones.

Motorola has also licensed iType, Agfa Monotype's font engine based on TrueType® and OpenType® industry-standard font formats. iType allows for the rapid generation of scalable characters at virtually any size. Manufacturers and developers worldwide have licensed iType, collectively representing millions of digital communication devices operating with the technology. Embedded within memory-constrained devices such as cell phones and set-top boxes, iType provides OEMs the ability to efficiently build products that can quickly generate highly legible text. In addition to over 1,300 TrueType fonts, compact stroke-based fonts and Agfa Monotype's WorldType® multi-language Unicode™-compliant fonts, developers can choose from a selection of typefaces fine-tuned for optimal display on cell phones and other low-resolution, memory-restricted devices. iType also works with custom typefaces, bitmaps, embedded bitmaps, outlines and font subsets.

Also See: motorola cell phone accessories.

About The Author:

Shawnee McRoberts is a successful author and regular contributor to http://www.1st-in-cell-phones.com.  An industry resource for the wireless industry featuring articles, comparisons and reviews of phones and service plans.