Saffron: High Quality Scalable Type for Digital Displays
The Saffron Type System (Saffron) is a breakthrough approach to rendering high quality type on digital displays. Built on a core of patented Adaptively Sampled Distance Field (ADF) technology, Saffron achieves its superior results without the liabilities of current approaches. Saffron is a key enabling technology for the display of rich textual content on the next generation wireless devices and flat panel displays.
Saffron has been licensed to Macromedia (now Adobe) and is shipping in Flash Player 8. The Adobe Flash Player reaches close to 100% of all Internet-enabled desktops. Saffron has also been licensed to Monotype Imaging, a leading provider of fonts and font technologies, who will be integrating Saffron into their future products.
Background & Objective: Saffron offers the following advantages over existing type systems: Highly legible type even at very small font sizes without the use of labor intensive manual hinting; Unparalleled adaptability for flat panel display technologies including new materials such as OLED; Unique Continuous Stroke Modulation (CSM) provides interactive user tuning of type for enhanced viewing comfort and personal preference; Backward compatible with the thousands of outline fonts already available in OpenType, Type 1, and TrueType format; Full support for rendering compressed stroke fonts; Automatic high quality outline-based and stroke-based CJK rendering; Computationally clean rendering pipeline straightforward to implement in silicon; Supports advanced applications such as pen-based input, 3D type, animation, and special effects; Patently distinct from coverage/image based rendering approaches.
Technical Discussion: Saffron provides an alternative font rasterizer that can be integrated in the OS, at the application level, or in embedded systems. It takes font outline or stroke descriptions as input, converts them to an internal ADF representation and renders them in real time. Because Saffron rendering is computationally simple and does not use TrueType or Type 1 hinting required by competing technologies, fonts do not need to be special cased; consequently, Saffron can be accelerated using standard graphics processing units (GPUs) or even implemented in hardware.
Outside Collaborations: Adobe Systems; Monotype Imaging; Sarah Frisken, Professor, Computer Science, Tufts University.
Contact: Ron Perry
Technology Areas:
Off the Desktop Interaction and Display
Graphics
Modification Date: September 12, 2007
