What’s New in D-Type 5

All Platforms

• As announced in November 2013, D-Type 5.0 comes with two text layout extensions that can be used in conjunction with D-Type Font Engine: the legacy one which is based on the ICU LayoutEngine and a new one which is based on the HarfBuzz text shaping engine. Although HarfBuzz is still new and under active development, we wanted to create a text layout extension that can take advantage of its capabilities now. At the same time it was important to ensure that the application programming interface of the new extension remains 100% identical to the existing ICU-based Text Layout Extension. This means that from the API point of view no changes in client code are necessary. All it takes is a simple replacement of one extension with another. And if your application is linked to the dynamic library version of our extension, you don’t even need to recompile your code to start using the new HarfBuzz engine.

• The new HarfBuzz text shaping engine will supersede and make ICU LayoutEngine obsolete in the near future. HarfBuzz is designed to provide better support for complex scripts and advanced typography. For example, in the future it is possible that some of the vertical text processing that D-Type PowerDoc Engine currently does on its own will be supplemented by HarfBuzz. Also, our expectation is that HarfBuzz will open new possibilities for advanced and/or exotic typographic and layout capabilities that are currently not possible with the ICU-based Text Layout Extension. One thing to note, however, is that at this point in time HarfBuzz is primarily an OpenType layout engine and does not provide support for Apple Advanced Typography (AAT) layout tables. While it is reasonable to assume that this support might be added at some point in the future, the fact that OpenType has been adopted much more widely than AAT makes this less of an issue. Notwithstanding all of the above, the ICU-based Text Layout Extension is still available and will be fully supported in D-Type 5.0. It has been updated to include the latest ICU release which comes with important enhancements and security updates. This means that developers are free to choose the layout extension as they see fit.

• A major breakthrough in direct RGBA rasterization: In the past D-Type Engine offered only one direct color RGBA rasterizer, now called No-Overlap RGBA Rasterizer. It was very fast and featured extremely high-quality rendering and perfect stitching between adjacent fill areas of different color. However, it was not a general-purpose rasterizer due to one important limitation: in order for the colors of the rendered pixels to be correctly computed, all input 2D vector art had to be free of overlapping contours. In other words the input geometry had to be flat. However, starting with D-Type 5.0 this is no longer necessary so non-overlapping contours are now fully supported.

• Not only does D-Type 5.0 completely remove the restriction of non-overlapping contours, it also comes with 3 (three!) additional direct color RGBA rasterizers: Ultra-Fast RGBA Rasterizer, Reference RGBA Rasterizer and Alpha-Blend RGBA Rasterizer.

• The new Ultra-Fast RGBA Rasterizer is the one we are especially proud of. Not only is it a general-purpose rasterizer, i.e. capable of correctly and accurately rendering arbitrary non-flat RGBA geometry, but it can do this in a single pass, extremely fast. So fast, in fact, that some users who saw our early performance demos and real-time animations could not tell if the rendering is done in hardware or software. At the same time the quality of anti-aliased rendering and pixel stitching is superb and exceeds the quality offered by most video cards in use today.

• We are confident that our Ultra-Fast RGBA Rasterizer is the world’s fastest and highest-quality direct color software rasterizer available on the market today, much like our grayscale rasterizer was back in 1996 when we first released D-Type. The release of this state-of-the-art rasterizer represents the latest evolutionary step in our research on anti-aliased rasterization algorithms that started in 1996. Pretty much everything that was learned since then we were able to put into this rasterizer. If you are looking for a super fast, general purpose, software-based RGBA rasterizer that produces identical results down to (sub)pixel on any platform or device then look no further.

• Overall, D-Type 5.0 is more optimized than our earlier releases, both in terms of the code size and performance. It comes with many other small enhancements and useful additions. This includes support for additional memory surface formats, improved precision of certain calculations, additional fonts etc.

If you are interested in evaluating D-Type 5.0, you can request D-Type Evaluation libraries from our Contact Us page.