Re: [ft] Compressing CJK Fonts effectively

[suzuki toshiya]

It's interesting theme for CJK people, but difficult
to give quick answer.

The meaning of "embedded system" is too broad to guess
the system limitation, in comparison with desktop,
laptop, netbook or OLPC, please describe more :-)

# small ROM but large RAM?
# consuming CPU is better than consuming ROM/RAM?
# speed of rendering?
# etc etc

Recent generic lossless compressing technologies,
like rzip, would show better compression result,
but will consume more memory/CPU powers.

--

In addition, you want to compress TrueType losslessly?
Or, you don't mind to loss some informations in
TrueType (and invent new TrueType-incompatible font
format)? For example, Agfa MicroType has a technology
called MicroType, to compress TrueType fonts by
restricting the rendering system and removing some
non-essential info for the system. The technology is
adapted by ISO MPEG-4 and Microsoft's embedded OpenType
and it seems that recent Windows Mobile uses it for
bundled CJK fonts. However, the technology is patented,
FreeType2 cannot support it until its expiration, or
change of the license.

W3C seems to work for new font format for web documents
(so the file size reduction would be important theme,
although memory/CPU consumation would not be so critical),
there is a possibility that you can find some interesting
technology.

Matthew Tippett wrote (2010/09/08 1:30):
> Hi,
>
> I am working on an embedded project which requires CJK truetype fonts.  
> Since it is an embedded system, I want to save as much disk space as 
> possible.
>
> The fonts we are using seem to compress to about 70% of their original 
> size - which could save around 13 MB on the ROM image.
>
> I noticed the post in 2002 from David Turner when he completed the gzip 
> support talking about not wanting to encourage stupid choices (like 
> gzip-compressed truetype fonts).

> What is the current best practice for managing large CJK fonts in a 
> storage efficient manner?
>
> Matthew
>
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