Agfa Monotype Announces Universal Font Scaling Technology version 4.4; UFST Font Subsystem for Printer Manufacturers Includes Support for Asian Stroke-Based Fonts.

Business/Technology Editors

CeBIT 2002

HANNOVER, Germany--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 15, 2002

Agfa Monotype Corporation has released version 4.4 of UFST(R) (Universal Font Scaling Technology(TM)), the most widely integrated font scaling technology used by printer manufacturers worldwide. UFST 4.4 features support for Agfa Monotype's Asian stroke-based fonts, providing OEMs the ability to embed Japanese, Chinese or Korean character sets while benefiting from reduced memory or storage requirements.

"With version 4.4, we've removed the impact on memory or storage for printer OEMs looking for a compact subsystem to support Asian languages," said Al Ristow, vice president of engineering for Agfa Monotype. "For instance, a standard JIS 208 Japanese TrueType(R) font with 7,484 characters is about 2.3 MB. Our stroke font equivalent is about 300 KB."

Stroke-Based Fonts

Agfa Monotype's fully scalable stroke-based fonts consist of composite strokes or `graphemes' - simple shapes used repeatedly to build complex Asian characters. Graphemes offer significant storage savings, as the same graphemes are used to construct the various characters that can add up to thousands in a single font. Another important storage advantage lies in the technology's simplicity: half the number of points is needed to render characters - half than what is necessary when building characters using traditional outlines, where points are located on the edges of shapes instead of at the centers. Agfa Monotype's high-quality stroke-based fonts are both native and Unicode(R)-encoded and are available for Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages.

UFST

Agfa Monotype's UFST is a compact, highly efficient embedded font scaling subsystem used in more than 90 percent of laser printers shipped worldwide. UFST reads, interprets and processes hinted font data to rapidly generate scaled character bitmaps, graymaps or grid-aligned outlines. The technology offers OEMs a lower ROM cost than alternative font rendering systems, and UFST is the only subsystem that uses industry-standard trademarked font names and font metrics, ensuring true compatibility with printers based on font standards by Adobe and Hewlett-Packard. UFST works with all industry-standard font formats such as TrueType and PostScript(R), and the technology supports Agfa Monotype's MicroType(TM) and ACT(TM) font compression technologies.

About Agfa Monotype Corporation

Agfa Monotype Corporation is a major provider of digital content for graphics professionals. The company is a recognized leader in fonts and font technologies and an innovator in color and screening technologies. Agfa Monotype is a wholly owned subsidiary of Agfa Corporation and is part of Agfa's Graphic Systems business unit. Agfa Corporation is part of the Agfa-Gevaert Group, one of the world's leading imaging companies, headquartered in Mortsel, Belgium. Agfa develops, produces and markets analog and digital systems, primarily for the graphics, medical imaging, non-destructive testing and consumer imaging and photography markets. Worldwide, sales for 2000 were 5.26 billion euros. In the U.S., Agfa is headquartered in Ridgefield Park, N.J. and employs approximately 4,000 people. Additional information about Agfa Monotype and its products can be found on the company's Web sites at www.agfamonotype.com and www.fonts.com.