D-Type is a suite of professional, high-performance, scalable rendering engines for fast and smooth (anti-aliased) text, 2D and 3D graphics with first-class support for D-Type, TrueType, OpenType, TrueType and OpenType Collections, Type 1, Type 3, Web Open Font Format (WOFF 1.0 and WOFF 2.0) and bare CFF fonts. This powerful and fully cross-platform technology is ideal for software developers who wish to render high-quality, anti-aliased text and scalable graphics from their applications, generating super-fast, crisp, clear and smooth output on any device, platform or operating system.
D-Type Standard Suite is our starter software package. This is a single C/C++ library that includes the following D-Type engines:
The following D-Type engines are available as optional extensions. Each is provided as a separate C/C++ library:
Users who wish to take full advantage of D-Type’s capabilities might be more interested in D-Type Power Suite, which includes the following D-Type engines. Each engine ships as a separate C/C++ library:
In addition to the above libraries, we offer the following applications and tools:
D-Type technology is the result of our extensive experience in fonts, font hinting and digital type technologies, 2D and 3D rendering, text and layout processing and other related domains of digital publishing, interactive digital solutions and system software development. Our work on D-Type began in early 1995 primarily as a research project. Due to the success of this project, we decided to release the first public version of D-Type Font Engine and D-Type Rasterizer in early 1996. D-Type PowerDoc Engine and D-Type Text Layout Extension followed a few years later. From the very beginning, the goal of the project was to create a superior font and scalable graphics rendering engine suitable for all types of applications — including the most demanding ones, such as games and multimedia software. To achieve this goal, a whole set of completely new algorithms had to be invented and developed: sophisticated anti-aliased rendering, intelligent automatic font hinting, advanced real-time font interpolation, and grayscale bitmap tuning are just a few examples. Today, D-Type is likely the world’s fastest cross-platform software rendering technology for smooth text and 2D and 3D graphics.
Here are the top 10 reasons to choose D-Type:
Unsurpassed quality, speed and performance. D-Type can be used in a broad range of applications, including charting, presentations, computer animation, games, desktop publishing and more.
Excellent anti-aliasing capabilities with support for up to 256 levels of any color. Regardless of the size, D-Type output is always crisp and smooth!
Manual font hinting is not necessary. D-Type Font Engine has a built-in auto-hinting subsystem that produces stunning results with virtually any font.
Supports kerning, rotation, true text outline with custom thickness, custom transparency and special effects. Suitable for both device independent and device dependent text.
Clean, robust, reliable, object-oriented and cross-platform API, effective memory management and highly optimized code.
Support for D-Type, TrueType, OpenType, Type 1 and bare CFF fonts, as well as TrueType and OpenType font collections. Variable and Multiple-Master support is available for OpenType, Type 1 and D-Type fonts.
2D text transformations including horizontal and vertical compression, expansion, skew, mirroring and rotation.
D-Type can pass grayscale data to your application as a bitmap image. This is ideal for bitmap data manipulation or masking other images.
D-Type libraries are fully reentrant and, when used properly, thread-safe. You can initialize as many instances of D-Type engines as necessary and use them simultaneously!
Over 20 years of experience in system and application development, rasterization, digital type and font technologies.
D-Type is designed with portability in mind. Our code is written in a clean, object-oriented and platform-independent manner in a subset of industry standard C++. Consequently, all D-Type engines can be compiled and deployed on virtually any platform in existence today. This includes Microsoft Windows, Linux, macOS, iOS, Android, Xbox, Raspberry Pi, Zealz GK802 Quad Core Android Mini PC and even MS-DOS. Since the D-Type API is consistent across all these platforms, developers of cross-platform applications only need to learn one API and implement their D-Type rendering subsystem once.
Licensed D-Type libraries are available out of the box for Microsoft Windows (all versions, both Intel and ARM based), macOS (all versions, both Intel and ARM based), Linux (all modern distributions, both Intel and ARM based), BSD (FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD), iOS, Android, Xbox and Raspberry Pi. Custom builds for other platforms are also available upon request. For more information on pricing and different licensing options, please see our Contact Us page.
Although D-Type libraries are written in C++, they feature a C-style public API. This design ensures that the library functions can be called from various programming languages and development frameworks in use today, maximizing D-Type’s interoperability.
To ensure quick and smooth integration, D-Type comes with numerous examples that demonstrate various D-Type features. In addition, all licensing options come with optional support and free future upgrades.
D-Type delivers exceptional quality through a combination of advanced anti-aliasing capabilities and innovative hinting and auto-hinting technologies. D-Type’s anti-aliasing supports up to 256 levels of gray (or other color intensities), while font hinting significantly improves text legibility. Unlike many other graphics packages that generate gray-levels simply by down-sampling a larger black and white bitmap, D-Type generates gray-levels during the rasterization process itself. As a result, D-Type’s rasterizer is lightning fast and does not suffer from overflow problems when generating extremely large characters or shapes. In brief, D-Type’s anti-aliasing is not just a mechanism that makes the diagonal lines look smooth; it is a sophisticated technology designed to enhance screen resolution and improve text legibility, regardless of the size or device.
D-Type Font Engine is one of the very few font engines that directly supports Variable or Multiple-Master font technology. This revolutionary breakthrough allows two or more outline fonts, or base designs, to be incorporated into a single font file. This unique feature allows applications to create hundreds or thousands of additional font variations from a single font file by applying D-Type’s real-time interpolation capabilities (also known as font morphing). Examples of possible font variations include transitions from Light to Black, Condensed to Extended, Sans Serif to Serif, or Wedge Serif to Slab Serif.
D-Type Font Engine supports the following industry-standard font formats:
In addition to these base formats, D-Type Font Engine supports both WOFF 1.0 and WOFF 2.0 (Web Open Font Format) packaging of TrueType and OpenType fonts and font collections.
D-Type Font Engine excels when it comes to special text effects and text transformations. D-Type text can be drawn at any size (with kerning and inter-character spacing adjustable), stretched, compressed, mirrored (horizontally and/or vertically), skewed (horizontally and/or vertically), rotated, outlined (with customizable thickness), transparent (with adjustable opacity), embossed, filled, dilated, blurred, shaded, on a path and more. Additionaly, D-Type makes it possible to draw anti-aliased text or shapes filled with custom textures sourced from other bitmaps or images.
Both D-Type Font Engine and D-Type Rasterizer can render to 8-bit grayscale or various 16, 24 and 32-bit RGB(A) surface formats provided by your application. This rendering method is platform-independent, extremely fast and well-suited for real-time animations. Furthermore, the surface’s RGB(A) data can be easily retrieved and optionally saved in popular image formats.
Applications can leverage D-Type’s ultra-fast rasterizers to generate anti-aliased shapes or scalable vector-based graphics of outstanding quality. All D-Type rasterizers are highly customizable and support both the Odd-Even and Nonzero Winding Number rules. Additionally, the D-Type package includes a library of common 2D shapes, such as lines, circles, ellipses, rectangles, rounded rectangles and polygons, which can be drawn filled or stroked with a custom line width. The library is shipped as source code and can be easily expanded or modified.
D-Type supports extensive character sets, including national character code standards used with Chinese, Japanese or Korean (CJK) fonts. Its Unicode character representation makes it possible to display all character sets in the world simultaneously.
D-Type features a clean, simple, robust, object-oriented and cross-platform API. Since global/static variables are not used in our libraries, applications can initialize multiple instances of D-Type engines and use their functions simultaneously. As a result, D-Type libraries can operate in multi-threaded environments without relying on mutexes or other synchronization or blocking mechanisms.
The following is just a partial list of companies using D-Type in their applications:
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ArcSoft
http://www.arcsoft.com |
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Creative Solutions
http://www.creativesolutions.com |
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Creative Technology Ltd.
http://www.creative.com |
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FormWeb
FormWeb.com online forms generator relies on D-Type engine for charting and dynamic graphics. |
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GOTO Software ButtonFly is an excellent application for button generation powered by D-Type Font Engine and Rasterizer. |
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Hewlett-Packard Co.
http://www.hp.com |
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Partners Imaging Services
http://www.partnersimaging.com |
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TEDISYS Tele Diffusion Systems |
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Veer |
And this is what they said...
“ I really like the rasterizer — the output quality is fantastic.”
“ I was impressed by the quality and speed of the engine, and want to integrate it in all our products.”
“ That’s great! Multiple-Master support is a big issue for us.”
“ The engine works very good in our application.”
“ I’m thinking of replacing our entire engine with D-Type, because D-Type seems to be much faster and it produces better looking text.”
“ Rendering is really fast. We draw really large shapes and it always works.”
“ I’m glad that we finally switched to a unified font API that works like a charm on Windows, Mac and Linux. Thank you D-Type for this fantastic solution!”
“ Your last email was very helpful. The results are very good! ”
D-Type 10.0, released on July 1, 2025, is the latest major D-Type release. This release ships with a new D-Type Script Interpreter library and introduces built-in support for COLR Version 1 OpenType fonts, new gradient types, significantly faster rendering of OpenType color fonts with SVG glyphs, an updated D-Type External Format Plugin, an updated D-Type Text Layout Extension with the HarfBuzz 11.2.1 shaping library, and many other important features and enhancements. See this article for details and frequently asked questions.
D-Type 9.0, released on December 20, 2021, is another major D-Type release that brings support for 3D rasterization, OpenType SVG Native fonts, the HarfBuzz 3.2.0 shaping library, additional Unicode scripts, and other important new features and capabilities. See this article for details and frequently asked questions.
D-Type 8.0, released on July 21, 2020, is a major D-Type release with more exciting new features and capabilities. See this article for details and frequently asked questions.
D-Type 7.5, released on May 22, 2020, is a major D-Type release with some exciting new features and capabilities. This is probably the most important update since the release of D-Type Engine 7.0 in August 2018. See this article for an overview of what’s new in this release
D-Type Engine 7.0 was released on August 30, 2018. This major version enables support for OpenType 1.8 variable fonts (with either TrueType or CFF2 outlines) and introduces many new text style/formatting options.
In November 2016, we announced the release of D-Type Engine 6.0. This release comes with new features and enhancements designed to simplify common tasks, boost performance and enable additional capabilities. See this article for an overview of what’s new in this release.
The 5.0 release, first made available for download on January 30, 2014, marks another important milestone in our principal research and development project that focused on font rasterization, text layout and scalable 2D graphics rendering technologies.
D-Type 5.0 features an application programming interface (API) that is backward compatible with our 4.0 release. However, some obsolete and/or undocumented APIs have been removed and a number of new features have been added. See this article for an overview of what’s new in this release.
Compared to our previous releases, D-Type 4.0 also introduces numerous new features, improvements and optimizations. See this article for an overview of what’s new in this release.
Available in binary, object, and/or source code format for any hardware or operating system environment, D-Type technology is an excellent choice for software developers seeking a rendering solution that is affordable, mature, reliable, secure, well-maintained, well-supported, super-fast and packed with features.
Copyright © 1996-2025 D-Type Solutions. Last updated on August 22, 2025.
