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East Asian Fonts

Monotype Imaging offers a wide selection of fonts to address East Asian scripts including Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese. East Asian fonts are available in an assortment of styles and formats to address the varying needs of OEMs and application developers.

East Asian TrueType Fonts
Compact Asian Technology for TrueType® (CATT™) fonts deliver the style and aesthetics of traditional TrueType fonts with a significantly reduced file size. File size reduction is accomplished through a unique compositing process that allows glyphs used in multiple characters to be stored just once within the font file.

Monotype Imaging also offers a variety of traditional TrueType fonts and CATT fonts supporting East Asian scripts suitable for embedded use. Click here for more information.

East Asian Stroke Fonts
Monotype Imaging stroke-based fonts are an ideal solution for memory-constrained devices that need to display text in East Asian languages. Due to their simple, stroke-based forms, stroke fonts can contain the thousands of characters required for East Asian scripts with a file size the fraction of a traditional East Asian TrueType design. Stroke fonts can be scaled to any size while offering superior display quality.

SmartHint™ Technology for East Asian Fonts
East Asian characters can lose legibility when displayed at small sizes. Spaces between character strokes may disappear or look blotted. Monotype Imaging’s SmartHint technology maintains the legibility of these characters at small sizes by preserving spatial relationships and removing strokes, if necessary.

East Asian Font Comparison
Style: Developers and OEMs in need of highly stylized East Asian fonts should look to TrueType fonts. The TrueType format permits high levels of detail including variations in stroke thickness that are not available in stroke-based fonts.

Legibility: Both TrueType and stroke fonts are scalable and deliver high quality at most sizes. However, the complexity of East Asian characters causes both formats to lose detail when rendered at small sizes. Monotype Imaging’s SmartHint technology delivers excellent display quality down to 12 ppem and is recommended for developers and OEMs displaying East Asian text at small point sizes.

Footprint: The large quantity of characters in East Asian fonts produces exceptionally large file sizes. This is particularly the case with TrueType fonts. Monotype Imaging’s Compact Asian TrueType fonts use a compression technique to offer significantly smaller footprints than traditional TrueType fonts without sacrificing style. While much more simple in style, Monotype Imaging stroke fonts deliver the smallest file sizes. Monotype Imaging’s SmartHint technology can be applied to stroke fonts to ensure high quality at small sizes at the expense of an increase in file size.