Higlyph®

Rendering engine for scalable fonts
High speed rendering and versatile effects
on the embedded environment

Higlyph (pronounced "hai glif") is a rendering engine for scalable fonts. It runs at a high speed on any embedded environment from low-end to high-end, and delivers a wide range of effects including gradation, drop shadow, etc.
The special algorithm enables speedy rendering of beautiful and well-designed high quality fonts, even on the embedded environment.

Higlyph

Higlyph features

Recommended devices

Versatile effects
Elaborate designs can be easily incorporated in the user interface (UI) by diverse effects that are not supported in regular font rendering engines.

List of effects

Soft outline	Drop shadow
Blur	Pattern (Textured character)
Gradation	Lighting

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Powerful basic features
Supports all the basic functionalities required for rendering font characters.
Capable of applying small size characters with anti-aliasing, which is an indispensable functionality for rendering high quality fonts.

List of features

Non-step-scaling and rotation of font characters
Bold face, italic face
Font color change
Alpha-blending with the background
Layout
Anti-aliasing

	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.
	Font color change Capable of changing the color of each font character.
	Alpha-blending with the background Capable of beautifully blending the character and the background.
	Anti-aliasing Scalable fonts are rendered, and eventually displayed per pixel, always making some jaggedness 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 ]

Drop shadow and Soft outline		Text scrolling		Font character layout
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High speed rendering
The special rendering algorithm supports any environment, bringing a dramatic increase in the rendering speed.

Benchmark results (Test conducted by HI CORPORATION)

	HiFont(hhf) Higlyph rendering results using a special intermediate format. The intermediate format is converted from TrueType.
	HiFont(ttf) Higlyph rendering results using a TrueType font.
	FreeType A free font rendering engine's rendering results using a TrueType font.
	Competition Rendering results of a font rendering engine from other companies, using a TrueType font.

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.

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Compact library and data
- Library
  Compact sizes ranging from approximately 50 KB to 200 KB
- Font data
  Using a special intermediate format of HI CORPORATION, file sizes can be reduced to approximately 40% to 60%. Also capable of directly using commercial TrueType fonts

Higlyph architecture

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Flexibility and expandability
Capable of developing a flexible architecture by linking functionality modules that are necessary on a case-by-case basis.

Package contents

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Functional specifications

Specifications

Operating environment	CPU	Various CPUs including ARM family, SH family, etc.
	Code size	From 50 KB to 200 KB (Varies depending on the module to be used)
	Engine work area	Approx. from 30 KB to 200 KB (Varies depending on the cache or effects to be used)
OS/Platforms		Various OS/platforms including Android, ITRON, Windows Mobile, etc.
Language (Layout)		Japanese, English and other European languages, Chinese, Korean, etc.
Format		TrueType (ttf, ttc), HI special format (hhf)
Color format		Various color formats including gray scale, 8-bit index color, RGBA8888, etc.

Functionalities

Basic functionality		Non-step-scaling of font characters, rotation, bold face, italic face, font color change, alpha-blending with the background, layout, anti-aliasing
Special effect		Soft outline, drop shadow, blur, pattern (textured character), gradation, lighting

For more details, please send your inquiry from Contacts page.