Introducing Monotype Spark™ 2.0: Low-memory scalable type just got better.
Makers of smart watches, wearables, medical devices, automotive dashboards and other resource-constrained devices no longer have to use low-quality bitmap fonts for their displays. The Monotype Spark Solution brings the benefits of scalable type and high-quality multilingual font display to the embedded environment - and it just got a major upgrade.
Monotype Spark 2.0, released this year, is packaged as ANSI C code for broad, flexible integration. Designed specifically for resource-constrained apps and devices, Spark now has significantly improved application startup times, updated global language support, improved font switching performance, and other new features and upgrades that support more languages and larger character sets. Those new features include:
- Unicode 12.1.0 support. The Monotype Spark solution is now compliant with Unicode 12.1.0 character properties and algorithms, providing improved global language support and coverage.
- Prepopulated cache. Significantly improve application startup times with iType ®, Spark’s API. Retrieve and store cache metadata and glyph data to prepopulate the cache for initial screens at runtime.
- Glyph pixel data alignment. Have a 64-bit platform? iType® Spark’s compile directive can now align glyph pixel data requests to 8 bytes only for best performance.
- Multi-font cache. Improve performance by storing glyphmaps from multiple fonts in the cache at the same time, which makes switching between fonts both simple and fast.
- FontMap fallback. True font fallback with FontMaps has arrived, ensuring text is fully and properly rendered. Now the Spark engine will search through your font list for a required character if that character can’t be found in the primary font.
- New font modifications and additions. Compressed versions of Japanese, Korean, and Simplified Chinese are now available, meaning your beautiful displays can be appreciated globally.
These improvements result in beautiful, legible text for a global audience, plus reduced cost and time to market and flexibility for future product iterations. To learn more about how Spark can improve your embedded devices or displays, contact us.
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