D-Type Font Engine

A portable and feature-rich font engine library for rendering text of superb output quality with top-notch support for all scalable font formats.

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D-Type Font Engine is a portable C/C++ font engine library for applications that require fast, beautifully rasterized and highly legible scalable anti-aliased text. D-Type Font Engine supports D-Type, TrueType, OpenType, Type 1, Type 3 and bare CFF fonts, and features a robust, reliable and extensive font format-independent API. This library is suitable for any applications that wish to support all major scalable font formats while providing a wealth of features, advanced rendering capabilities and the highest output quality.

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 or TrueType instructions to output perfectly pixel-tuned text. In fact, D-Type’s unique, intelligent and fully automated built-in font hinting mechanism makes your fonts look better than other font rendering technologies. The engine is suitable for all types of output devices, including monitors, LCD and TV screens, delivering exceptional performance and quality at any size on any platform.

Standard Features

• Unsurpassed speed and quality
• Sharp and smooth (anti-aliased) type at any size
• Variable and Multiple-Master font support
• Rotation, 2D/3D transformations and special effects
• Built-in automatic font hinting to enhance the display of fonts.
• Fractional pixel positioning
• Optional sub-pixel rendering optimized for LCD screens (RGB or BGR color ordering)
• Resolution and device independent, while also being highly suitable for device-dependent (optimized) output
• Transparent text, with adjustable transparency
• Renders to a plethora of device independent memory surface formats (8-bpp grayscale, 16-bpp, 24-bpp RGB and various 32-bpp RGBA formats) or Windows-compatible Device Context surfaces
• Synthetic font emboldening
• True text outline with custom thickness
• Soft shadows (Gaussian and Fuzzy Blur) and pattern fills
• Full support for D-Type, TrueType, OpenType, Type 1 and bare CFF fonts.
• Full support for parsing OpenType color fonts with sbix tables containing embedded PNG and/or JPEG images
• Full support for parsing OpenType color fonts with COLR Version 0 and COLR Version 1 tables NEW
• Full support for the WOFF 1.0 and WOFF 2.0 (Web Open Font Format) packaging of TrueType and OpenType fonts and font collections
• Support for PostScript Type 3 fonts that adhere to D-Type’s parsing rules
• Built-in support for both ANSI and Unicode character sets
• Highly compressed native D-Type font format
• Designed to process and render a wide range of fonts available in the market, even those that are broken or malformed.
• Fonts can be opened in strict or relaxed processing mode
• Low hardware requirements
• Highly configurable

Variable and Multiple-Master Font Support

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).

BASE DESIGN B1=100% B2=0% B3=0% B4=0%	INTERMEDIATE DESIGN B1=67% B2=33% B3=0% B4=0%	INTERMEDIATE DESIGN B1=33% B2=67% B3=0% B4=0%	BASE DESIGN B1=0% B2=100% B3=0% B4=0%
INTERMEDIATE DESIGN B1=67% B2=0% B3=33% B4=0%	INTERMEDIATE DESIGN B1=44% B2=22% B3=22% B4=12%	INTERMEDIATE DESIGN B1=22% B2=44% B3=12% B4=22%	INTERMEDIATE DESIGN B1=0% B2=67% B3=0% B4=33%
INTERMEDIATE DESIGN B1=33% B2=0% B3=67% B4=0%	INTERMEDIATE DESIGN B1=22% B2=12% B3=44% B4=22%	INTERMEDIATE DESIGN B1=12% B2=22% B3=22% B4=44%	INTERMEDIATE DESIGN B1=0% B2=33% B3=0% B4=67%
BASE DESIGN B1=0% B2=0% B3=100% B4=0%	INTERMEDIATE DESIGN B1=0% B2=0% B3=67% B4=33%	INTERMEDIATE DESIGN B1=0% B2=0% B3=33% B4=67%	BASE DESIGN B1=0% B2=0% B3=0% B4=100%

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. The engine generates exactly the same result, down to the pixel, on any platform your application runs on — whether this is Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android, or your own custom embedded system.

Unique Automatic Font Hinting

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. It goes without saying that our automatic hinting is script and language independent. It works equally well with Roman, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Indic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and other world’s scripts.

Because our hinting technology preserves the 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.

Special Style Effects

D-Type excels when it comes to special effects. The next illustration showcases just a few of the possibilities.

Text Filtering / Bitmap Tuning

D-Type Font Engine offers developers a variety of 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 performed 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 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.

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 to 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:

Key Specifications

Screenshots

Here are a few screenshots that show D-Type Font Engine in action.