Scalable type has arrived in mobile devices, and it’s here to stay. Compared to bitmap alternatives, scalable fonts can help you improve time-to-market, reduce memory requirements, leverage built-in flexibility, and take advantage of typeface designs optimized for mobile environments.

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Virtually every mobile application can benefit from scalable fonts and font technology, such as user interfaces, Web browsers, e-mail and texting, and office applications. Technology advances, users’ expectations, and now industry standards are reshaping the competitive playing field in the mobile phone industry. Today, the issue is maximizing scalable type to garner benefits quickly with the highest return on investment.

What’s In It For You?

Scalable fonts and font technologies offer capabilities that help you deploy products faster. Device manufacturers, developers, operators, and mobile designers can take advantage of benefits that outweigh bitmap solutions in a number of ways, including the ability to:

• reduce storage/memory requirements for fonts
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  integrate high-quality, scalable fonts that can be used across product families from the low end to the high end
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  use a single font that can be scaled to any size for each type design to fit more designs and more languages in a mobile phone
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  support multiple languages for local, regional, or international markets through high-quality fonts
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  maintain character fidelity, clarity, and legibility on any screen, regardless of text size or character complexity
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  develop and design applications and content using downloaded fonts
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  take advantage of typographic capabilities and special effects, such as the ability to embolden text or add a drop shadow to enable text to stand out from busy backgrounds
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  comply with industry specifications that call for support of scalable fonts
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  integrate stylistic fonts that are right for your product

The Path From Desktop To Mobile

In 1981, IBM announced its first personal computer, which shipped with a small number of fixed-in-sized bitmap fonts. Other manufacturers followed suit, as the first PCs were limited mostly to creating spreadsheets and word processing documents. Not until Adobe introduced PostScript scalable technology in 1985 did the digital communications revolution get underway. No sooner had the first scalable fonts been released in the Mac OS System 7 and Windows 3.1 operating systems in the early 1990s that users sought more fonts—and not just to create office documents.

Bitmap fonts, not surprisingly, represented the earliest type format in mobile phones. These fonts were an appropriate choice during the nascent phase of mobile phones, when a closed set of parameters was required for support. They typically involved one or two text sizes, in addition to one or two languages for displaying text on primitive LCD displays.

Today, the parameters are much different. Screen resolutions vary, several text sizes are required, many of the world’s languages must be supported, and anti-aliasing is used to produce clear text. The integration of scalable font technology can meet such requirements for high-quality, dynamic, multilingual text—and this is happening now.

Over the last few years, text imaging companies have brought scalable solutions to handset manufacturers who are now shipping devices that use scalable fonts. A few have also brought scalable fonts and font technologies to various mobile development platforms, including the Qualcomm BREW solution, Symbian OS, and open-source Linux-based environments.

Today, mobile phones are the new frontier for branded and personalized communications. Downloadable fonts are also a new area of opportunity, acknowledged by industry groups and standards development organizations that are already taking steps to accommodate this advance.

From several vantage points, device manufacturers, operators, developers, and mobile designers are recognizing that scalable fonts represent opportunity in a number of ways—opportunity that can reduce time-to-market, lessen development time, improve aesthetics, enhance usability, and instill brand trust.