monotype

Monotype Imaging today announced a new mobile font suite designed for Android Ice Cream Sandwich devices. The suite, which offers a slew of tools and services for developers and manufacturers, is called "Type Enhancements for Android."

Though some of the tools in the suite have been previously available to developers, it is the first time they have all been offered in an all-in-one package.

One such module, known as the iType font engine with Edge Tuning, promises OEMs better and cleaner text rendering.

In addition to that, the suite offers a greater breadth of language support than within … Read more

Monotype Imaging acquired the font business of rival Bitstream for about $50 million in cash, a move that gives it greater clout in the world of digital typography.

Through the acquisition, announced yesterday, Monotype Imaging gets Bitstream's typeface library, its MyFont site for browsing 89,000 fonts and licensing them for use on Web sites, the WhatTheFont service for identifying typefaces, its Font Fusion and Panorama software for font rendering and layout, and 10 patents. It's also hiring 50 Bitstream employees and taking over its research and development site in India.

The move gives Monotype Imaging more heft … Read more

Hoping to aid fancy typography on the Web, font powerhouse Monotype Imaging has released technology called MicroType Express (MTX) so it's free for public use, CNET has learned.

MTX is patented compression technology that shrinks font download sizes, hastening the moment when a person can see a Web page with its intended typography, but Monotype Imaging is releasing the technology under very liberal licensing terms. Microsoft licensed MTX for use in Internet Explorer, and now Monotype has won over another major browser maker, Google, the companies plan to announce today.

With its "make the Web faster" initiative, … Read more

Monotype Imaging is bringing its font-rendering software a step into the future with hardware acceleration features it expects will help improve readability, add fancy features such as 3D, and offload work from mobile devices' main processors.

The company, while perhaps best known for creating and licensing typefaces, also has a business selling software that lets printers print the text and devices such as e-book readers display it on screens. It's this last category where the company offers its iType product, and the new version 5.0 announced today adds the new hardware acceleration features.

iType 5.0 draws upon … Read more

Monotype Imaging has opened up a batch of 500 more typefaces for use on the Web and announced a partnership under which those publishing on Acquia's Drupal Gardens can use the service.

Web fonts, after languishing for years, are giving typeface makers a new business opportunity with the arrival of new abilities in the formatting technology called CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) in modern browsers. With it, Web publishers can employ downloadable fonts to give their Web sites a more memorable look or to add some pizazz not possible with the limited number of "Web-safe" fonts that can be expected to already be installed on a browser's computer.

It's not that such typography wasn't possible before on the Web. It's just that it likely was done with graphics rather than type. Graphics, though, can be bulky to download, don't scale well to different screen sizes, aren't noticeable as text to search engines, and can't be copied and pasted as text.

Monotype Imaging now licenses hundreds of its fonts for online use through its Fonts.com site. Among the new arrivals to the online service is ITC Avant Garde Gothic, a widely used sans-serif typeface.

It seems likely that budget-minded publishers might steer clear of fonts with a fee, opting instead for free options such as Google's Web-font options. But Drupal Gardens also is used by corporations and others that might be more concerned about a refined look or proper brand identity.

Drupal Gardens also announced recently that it's now hosting more than 50,000 sites and that it's improved several publishing tools. … Read more

Comic Sans, the Windows font reviled by font snobs everywhere, has joined the big leagues.

Monotype Imaging released the oxymoronic but definitely real Comic Sans Pro, taking advantage of April Fools' Day to bring some humor to the occasion. The new typeface combines a script style geared for typographically clumsy children's birthday invitations with high-end font features more commonly used on wedding invitations.

"Comic Sans Pro contains a versatile range of typographic features including swashes, small caps, ornaments, old-style figures, and stylistic alternates," Monotype said, referring to a variety of ways designers extend beyond the standard character … Read more

Monotype Imaging, showing further signs of adapting the old-school world of typographic design to the new era of technology, has acquired privately owned Ascender for $10.2 million.

The Woburn, Mass.-based company has been ramping up its effort to adapt to new media where fonts are used, launching its Web-based font service in September. The Ascender acquisition--for $7 million in cash and $3.2 million in stock--gives them a foothold in the smartphone world.

That's because Ascender designed typefaces including Droid for Google's Android operating system and Segoe WP for Microsoft's Windows Phone 7. The company … Read more

For those who make typefaces, there haven't been many changes since the invention of the printing press: hot lead, electronic typesetting, desktop publishing.

But now, more than 15 years after its invention, the World Wide Web is finally becoming the next frontier.

The steadily gaining influence of the medium and a new technology for distributing fonts to browsers has led one of the biggest names in typography to embrace the Web in earnest. On Tuesday, Monotype Imaging will open a catalog of nearly 8,000 of its fonts, with more to come, for use on Web pages.

Monotype Imaging's Web font service drew 15,000 users in beta testing with a smaller set of 2,200 fonts, but now it's launching for mainstream use.

When it comes to typography on the Web, "that world has been stunted," Monotype Imaging Chief Executive Doug Shaw said in an interview. "We look at it as a very important evolution in adapting typefaces to this new world."

Well, not new exactly, but new to the font industry. To date, most Web designers have relied on a strained combination of:

• A few "Web-safe" fonts such as Verdana and Arial that can be expected to be installed on most computers. • Text rendered in graphics formats such as JPEG. • Adobe Systems' Flash Player plug-in that offers polish but that's somewhat isolated from the rest of a Web page.

The arrival of Web fonts is an important milestone in the development of electronic media. The future of reading is text on screens--whether a book on a Kindle, a magazine on an iPad, or a news app on a mobile phone. Bringing that era to browsers is essential to making the Web as polished as other electronic media and as the print publications it's often supplanting.

Making the case for Web fonts Monotype Imaging is betting that businesses will see Web fonts as worth the new expense to their Web budgets. There are several potential reasons. … Read more