East Asian Stroke Fonts

An East Asian solution for Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages

The thousands of characters of East Asian scripts are no longer a burden to manufacturers of memory-constrained devices.

Traditional Asian TrueType® fonts require megabytes of storage – too much for most memory-restricted or low-resolution devices. Yet, storage requirements can be reduced 90 percent or more using our stroke-based fonts. Cell phones, set-top boxes, PDAs, control panel displays and many other devices can benefit from stroke-based fonts, when stylistic, typographic distinction is not a prominent requirement.

Stroke-based fonts use less than half the number of points as outline-based TrueType characters during the rendering process. Monotype Imaging’s stroke fonts include support for both native and Unicode™ encodings for East Asian languages.

Outline characters – Points that describe the character are along the edge. The font engine must define the edge and then fill in during rendering. For operating systems where large file sizes are acceptable, East Asian typefaces have traditionally been designed as outline fonts.

Stroke-based characters – Points are placed along the center line. Less than half the points are needed to render characters, improving character-generation performance. With the added help of graphemes, significant savings are realized in memory or disk space requirements.

Like our Edge™, Compact Asian for TrueType Technology (CATT™) and SmartHint™ solutions, stroke fonts economize on memory through its handling of characters that contain multiple instances of the same radicals or graphemes – components of characters. Unlike traditional TrueType fonts, Monotype Imaging’s East Asian solutions store radicals just once, helping to reduce file sizes.

Visit our multilingual font catalog to see and experience our rich assortment of OEM-ready fonts.

East Asian stroke-based font samples

Simplified Chinese

Traditional Chinese

Japanese

Korean