TYPE DESIGN INFORMATION PAGE last updated on Mon Apr 15 05:43:31 EDT 2024
FONT RECOGNITION VIA FONT MOOSE
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Saffron
The Saffron Type System (Saffron) is Mitsubishi's renderer for high quality type on digital displays. Announced in 2004, it is simple and compact: it takes font outline descriptions as input, converts them to an internal (ADF, or "Adaptively Sampled Distance Field") representation and renders them in real time. Here is the kicker: Because Saffron rendering is computationally simple and does not use TrueType or Type 1 hinting required by competing technologies, fonts do not need to be special cased. This is a day of victory for a guy like me who has been going around for ten years claiming that hinting is doomed and will eventually be unnecessary. Smart rendering should be the responsibility of the renderer, not the font. Interestingly, Flash 8 (2005, Macromedia) now uses Saffron, much to the dislike of some type salesmen who are worried about the legalities of font embedding. In January 2006, Monotype Imaging Inc., a global provider of font and imaging software technologies, has entered into an exclusive agreement with Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, Inc. (MERL), a subsidiary of the Mitsubishi Electric Corp., to license to customers its Saffron type rendering technology. |
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Luc Devroye ⦿ School of Computer Science ⦿ McGill University Montreal, Canada H3A 2K6 ⦿ lucdevroye@gmail.com ⦿ http://luc.devroye.org ⦿ http://luc.devroye.org/fonts.html |