Outline, Stroked, Bitmap and multi-colored fonts

Unlike many other text rendering systems, XcgfK provides excellent support for stroked fonts and multi-colored fonts (both colored bitmap, outline and stroked) in addition to more traditional monochrome bitmap and outline fonts.

PalmOs, Symbian, Mac OS X, WinCE, Win32, Linux

XcgfK supports a range of different platforms, including desktop computers like Windows, Mac and Linux, as well as hand held devices like PalmPilot, WinCE and Symbian (cell/mobile phone). XcgfK is a system level service on these platforms. An application would simply call the appropriate XcgfK api to let a low level service on the platform handle all aspects of text rendering (including any graphics operations, language support etc). As such, an application could be completely oblivious to all graphics rendering specifics of a platform when using XcgfK. (You could for example write an application without using a single call to GDI on Windows, X Windows on Linux or Quickdraw/Quartz on Mac.)

Monochrome, Grayscale and RGB sub-pixel rendering

These are pretty basic samples. As you can see, you may render text with monochrome, grayscale or rgb (sub-)pixels (e.g. colors). You need an LCD screen for this to look really good. Also, the samples include text at a pretty small point size because that kind of text is the hardest to show nicely. Also, XcgfK is intended to be used on devices with limited screen space where text must be small to fit.

Line and page layout formatting

XcgfK supports rendering multiple lines of text with a single API call. Formatting for such call include being able to set the color, including the transparency (Please note that the red and blue text in the first sample above is blended with the background). Formatting also include being able to align the text to the left, center, right as well as justify the text. The length of a line is guaranteed to scale linearly even if width of individual characters does not. For example, you would be able to scale page size and font size without causing a reflow of lines of a paragraph. Further more, XcgfK also support clipping single line of text by a character or by a word, both with and without trailing ellipses.

Various font formats

XcgfK supports quite a few different font formats. This support is quite extensive both in depth and breadth. For example, pretty much all PostScript font formats are supported, even stroke based fonts and PostScript printer fonts that require a PostScript interpreter (e.g. a printer device). Please note also that the bitmap fonts are scaled and rendered just like an outline or stroked fonts. (Note: Quality/hinting of vectorized bitmap fonts will be available in August, 2006).

Drawing images, strokes and shapes

XcgfK draws filled squares, pixels, filled and stroked paths as well as text. Please note that basic graphics is also done with RGB-subpixel rendering, and that all graphics operation may be blended with the background (colors are specified with a value where the "alpha" is used to specify the colors opacity).

Language support

One of the intentions with XcgfK is to provide support for most languages. You'll find samples of more demanding languages above, including Arabic, Bangla, Hebrew, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Telugu, Tamil, Simplified Chinese and Vietnamese.

Small caps, kerning, ligatures and more

There is a standard called OpenType layout that is used to provide typographical formatting styles, such as use of kerning pairs, small-caps, fractions and other style that give characters alternative shapes or positions. With XcgfK, it is quite easy to apply these styles. It's actually as easy to use these styles as it is to not use them. The same API would be used by an application when drawing text. The only difference is whether a list of styles (called "features" in OTL) are provided with the call or not. (Try switching quickly between the second and third image above to see the affect of using kerning pairs). The fourth sample was created by calling the same API in XcgfK as the third sample, except one more argument was provided to turn on the "small caps" style.

As you probably already know, images typically look slightly different on different platforms. Both colors and in particular brightness can be quite different on platforms like cell phones, PDAs, Mac OS X and Windows, monitors brands/types and graphics cards. It's typically not a problem since "different" doesn’t necessarily mean better or worse. For certain type of images like real photos and text, you do know what the image should look like though. Getting the correct brightness and saturation is essential in making that kind of images look good.

Further more, people's preferences and expectations varies greatly, with respect to sensitivity to contrast and colors. For example, some people love RGB sub-pixel rendering (what Microsoft calls Cleartype and Adobe calls Cooltype) while other hate it.

XcgfK address these quite fundamental differences on different platforms or different users. XcgfK is essentially "tuned" for the characteristics of a platform (gamma correction, use of colors, etc) as well as users’ preferences. To make a long story short — you can't see the benefit of that here. What you get here are images that look pretty good on Mac OS X with an LCD screen and a bit worse on other platforms.