v-rocs Outline - Outline Font Engine

Efficient on-the-fly rendering of outline fonts on mobile devices

v-rocs Outline features a unique and very CPU and memory efficient rendering algorithm that enables use of large point sizes without much memory penalty.

Feature highlights

• Fast and accurate variable size letter rendering for embedded systems
• Pre-integrated and bundled with v-rocs and language modules
• Provides efficient rendering of TrueType and OpenType fonts
• Supports Mobile Labs’ Indian Language Pack 1 (Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Gujarati) and future language packs
• Fixed point math throughout, increasing performance and portability
• Full anti-aliasing with up to 256 shades of grey
• Text attributes per glyph (with configurable levels of effect)
  • Text color
  • Background color
  • Faux italic
  • Faux bold
  • Shadow
  • Border/Outline
• Semi automatic hinting using horizontal and vertical stem adjustments
• Transfer/sharpening curves (RGB transitions)
• Safe font size rescaling secures that glyphs fit in a given box
• Optimized font file format
  • Considerably smaller and faster to access than normal OpenType
• Fast rendering core with customizable caches
  • Balancing memory and performance
  • Caches outlines (most memory efficient) or bitmaps (most speed efficient)
  • Uses a two-level approach with L1 (direct mapped) and L2 caches (N-way associative)
  • Outline fonts can also be pre-rendered during start-up and caches can also be completely deactivated for extreme memory constraints
  • Memory use etc can be configured freely
• Interchangeable with v-rocs bitmap rendering
  • No API change, and bitmap/outline can be combined
• It has a small memory footprint, low CPU requirements and high performance
  • 10-20% faster than FreeType
• Built in memory monitor for easy checking on memory use
• Written in ANSI C for maximum portability

Examples of text attributes

This picture shows Bengali in normal, faux italic, faux bold, faux bold/italic, black shadow and blue shadow.

Examples of use of scaling, hinting and transfer curve

These pictures show Bengali in different sizes using normal, hinted and intensified (via a transfer curve).

v-rocs Core + v-rocs Outline

v-rocs Outline is pre-integrated with v-rocs Core, providing a very competitive solution for rendering of Indic scripts using outline fonts.

Availability

v-rocs Outline is available now. It's bundled with v-rocs Core and language modules to achieve a complete rendering solution for complex scripts.

It's provided with fonts for the supported languages. The Indian fonts are provided by one of India's most renowned font foundries. Mobile Labs complements those fonts with additional glyphs for completeness.