What is the value of scalable fonts?
Fonts used in mobile phones are often of the bitmap variety: fonts that are fixed in size. Several sets of bitmap fonts are required within the development environment to cover a wide range of sizing possibilities for the screen. Additional sets of bitmap fonts may be further required to meet the needs of differing hardware configurations of various phone models. Add to the dilemma the complexity of language – Traditional Chinese, for example, involves thousands of characters. Bitmap fonts burden the development cycle in a variety of ways, from limited memory or storage capacity to the task of organizing and integrating multiple sets of bitmap fonts. Scalable fonts, in contrast, with their outlines stored as vector graphics, can be resized, eliminating the need to store each character at varying sizes as individual bitmaps. Scalable fonts require significantly less memory or storage, and they offer a flexible approach to accommodating various languages.
