Higlyph
Font rendering engine featuring a wide variety of layouts that allows
for quick rendering in any embedded environment
Features of Higlyph®
Font rendering engine to realize high speed rendering on any embedded environment, provided with various layout functions
"Higlyph" is a rendering engine for scalable fonts that applies a unique rendering algorithm to enable speedy rendering of attractive and well-designed fonts even on the embedded environment.
It runs on any embedded environment from low-end to OpenVG environment to realize high speed and high quality font rendering, while supporting as many as 57 languages.
Functionality of Higlyph®
Supports all the basic functionality required for rendering font characters. It also supports small size characters with anti-aliasing, which is essential for rendering high quality fonts.
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Scaling/Rotation/Italic face
A font character is handled as a vector information (a set of coordinates), enabling the smooth display of enlargement/reduction at an arbitrary scale, rotation, and italic face. 
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Font color change
Capable of changing the color of each font character. 
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Alpha-blending with the background
Smoothly Blending font characters with the background. 
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Anti-aliasing
Scalable fonts are rendered, and eventually displayed by pixels, always making some jaggies at the edge of font characters. Anti-aliasing applies gradations to these jagged edges so that borders between the background and glyphs look smoother.
Sample videos
Flexibility and expandability
Capable of developing a flexible architecture by linking necessary functionality modules on a case-by-case basis.
Performance
- High speed rendering
- The special rendering algorithm supports any environment, bringing a dramatic increase in the rendering speed.
When TrueType fonts are used on a regular font rendering engine, the rendering speed will decrease if a font data is extracted from files on an as-needed basis. However, Higlyph is capable of rendering fonts as fast as when the font data is extracted from a memory.
- Support of OpenVG
- Support of OpenVG promises faster rendering compared to those of the software version. The software and hardware versions can be switched simply by changing the rendering destination, since the APIs used are generally compatible.
- About APIs that support OpenVG
- Concerning effect type APIs, only some of them support OpenVG as of January 2012.
Layout engine
By implementing a layout engine, the layout functions are enhanced to realize multilingual support.
- Simple text rendering/layout
- Texts can be rendered by specifying the coordinate, character string, and font size for rendering. Alignment and character spacing can be also specified as options.
- Text rendering according to region size
- When the content of the text and the language are changed, the size can be adjusted automatically. Reduction of the implementation cost to use multiple languages can be expected.
- Text rendering of wrapping (multiple lines)
- Texts in multiple lines can be rendered. Basically, line feed is performed in the specified rectangle. However, line feed at arbitrary positions could be enabled by inserting line feed codes of Unicode in the text.
- ※Line feed spacing can be specified arbitrarily.
- ※Line boundary character check is currently not supported.
- ※Word wrapping is currently not supported.
Multilingual support（57 languages are supported）
- Icelandic
- Irish
- Afrikaans
- Arabian
- Albanian
- Italian
- Indonesian
- Ukrainian
- English
- Estonian
- Esperanto
- Dutch
- Kazakh
- Catalan
- Korean
- Greek
- Greenlandic
- Croatian
- Swedish
- Spanish
- Slovak
- Slovenian
- Serbian
- Thai
- Tamil
- Czech
- Chinese(Simplified)
- Chinese(Traditional)
- Telugu
- Danish
- German
- Turkish
- Japanese
- Norwegian
- Hungarian
- Hindi
- Finnish
- Faeroish
- French
- Bulgarian
- Vietnamese
- Hebrew
- Belarusian
(White Ruthenian) - Persian
- Bengali
- Polish
- Portuguese
- Portuguese
(Brazil) - Macedonian
- Marati
- Maltese
- Malay
- Lappish(Saami)
- Latvian
- Lithuanian
- Rumanian
- Russian
In the case of complicated languages such as Thai and Arabian, processing to combine multiple characters (ligature processing) and processing to control the direction of the text (bidirectional processing) are required. With Higlyph, these complicated languages can be handled easily by using the layout engine.
Compact library and data
- Library
- Compact sizes ranging from approximately 30 KB to 300 KB
- Font data
- File sizes can be reduced to approximately 30% to 60% when using our own intermediate format. Higlyph also supports commercial TrueType fonts.
- Dictionary function
- A function to specify characters to be converted. The file size can be minimized since only characters necessary for the application are extracted.
Versatile effects
Elaborate designs can be easily incorporated in the user interface (UI) by Higlyph’s diverse effect features that are not supported by regular font rendering engines.
Specifications of Higlyph®
- Basic
- Non-step-scaling of font characters, rotation, bold face, italic face, font color change, alpha-blending with the background, layout, anti-aliasing
- Special effects
- Outline, drop shadow, blur, pattern (textured character), gradation, lighting
Specifications
- OS / Platforms
- Various OS/platforms including Android, ITRON, Windows Mobile, etc.
- CPU
- Various CPUs including ARM family, SH family, etc.
- Code size
- Core library 30KB to 300KB
※depending on modules used
Layout library 175KB - Engine work area
- Approx. from 50 KB to 200 KB※Varies depending on the cache or effects to be used
- Language（Layout）
- 57 languages supported
- Format
- OpenType(otf), TrueType (ttf, ttc), Special format (hhf)
- Color format
- Various color formats including gray scale, 8-bit index color, RGBA8888, etc.