This section contains detailed information about XcgfK. You may want to look at the FAQ section. You'll find information about system requirements, XcgfK editions, language support, page formatting here.

Feature list

The key points for using XcgfK are:

• XcgfK provides a broad level of support for various languages. This support include many languages that are typically not available on many platforms, such as Arabic and Indic languages, and language with very large alphabets like Chinese, Japanese and Korean. XcgfK can for example be used with fonts with Chinese fonts with over 100 000 characters.
• XcgfK provides support for many font formats. These formats include the more common OpenType, TrueType, Type 1, Windows bitmap and Unix bitmap formats of various variants. Formats by extension are: BDF, FON, PCF, PFR, PK, PS, PFB, PFA, CID, TTF, OTF, TTC, SVG, XCGF. Details about use and feature set of some of these formats are listed below as well.
• The PostScript support in XcgfK is based on a native implementation of PostScript Language Level 3, called PreScript. Subsequently, many different flavors of PostScript fonts are supported, such as Type 0, Type 1, Type 2, Type 3 and Type 42. You are for example able to use more esoteric stroke based fonts written in PostScript that adds various color effects or coordinate transformations to individula characters. (Fonts where the glyphs are really separate postscript documents).
• Text rendering systems (rasterizers) typically performs a single task — putting together the pixels that makes up a letter by using vectors that defines the shape of that letter. XcgfK does the oposite as well. It will take bitmap glyphs and re-construct the outline definition of that letter. XcgfK will thus let you use bitmap fonts at any text size, as if they were scalable fonts. This is quite different from scaling bitmap fonts directly, in terms of quality and functionality. For example, characters can be rotated or rendered with RGB-subpixel quality (Cleartype/Cooltype kind of quality). Both quality and speed makes this a very new exciting way of rejuvenating old bitmap fonts.
• The output of XcgfK are letters rendered on a target canvas, such as a LCD screen, monitor, TV or plain paper. In doing so, XcgfK is able to optimize the result for the characteriztics of the canvas. The resulting images may thus consist of a monochrom image, a LCD rgb-subpixel image or a grayscale image. The LCD rgb-subpixel rendering support is in particular important on hand-held devices, where each pixel on the screen is divided into a red, green and blue strip. XcgfK is able to turn on these sub-pixel strips individually, thus theortically increasing horizontal resolution on hand-held devices by a factor of three.
• Multi-colored font formats, such as the PhotoFont format and PostScript Type 3 fonts, are fully supported by XcgfK. XcgfK works internally with colors in terms of red-green-blue-alpha components, where the alpha component is used to control the opacity of text. For example, text can be rendered with 85% opacity, thus allowing 15% of the background to blend with the color from the font.
• XcgfK is both fast and scalable, by using a unique caching sub-system. Internally, XcgfK uses the XCGF format to cached pre-rendered glyph outlines and bitmaps. This cache is persistent and permists client applications to instantly access and use a font without having to compute character shapes from a font file. This caching system was built to scale well up to several million fonts, each containing several million charcters. An equally important aspect is that is scales down well, thus allowing hand-held devices with limited storage space to use the system effectivly.
• Font files may be accessed through a number of different means with XcgfK. An application on a desktop computer would typically access a font as a file on the local hard disk. It may also access a font embedded within a document or distributed remotely over a network. With hand-held wireless devices fonts would almost exclusively be access from a remote server, because of the limited storage space on such a device. Such devices would thus synchronize with a remote server to fill the local cache with needed glyphs on demand, thus avoiding the need to keep entire font files on the device. These difference font data access methods are managed by XcgfK through I/O modules. Current version of XcgfK support data embedded in other media, font resources on the Internet (through HTTP) and fonts on the local file system.