Monotype Imaging's WorldType Layout Engine, a software library for enabling the composition, positioning and rendering of multilingual text on a variety of displays, now supports all the major written languages of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal. The additional capabilities will allow manufacturers and developers of devices such as cell phones, set-top boxes and printer control panels to increase penetration in high-growth South Asian markets.

The new version of WorldType Layout Engine builds upon Monotype Imaging's existing South Asian capabilities, which covered the Devanagari and Perso-Arabic writing systems. Nine additional scripts are now supported, including the Bengali, Telugu, Tamil, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Gurmukhi and Sinhala writing systems. Other new features include the ability to position text in non-rectangular regions, enabling words to flow around objects and images or allowing such elements to flow with text. Blocks of text can now be justified, allowing lines of copy to have the same length while being vertically aligned on both the right and left sides of the text block.

The announcement regarding Monotype Imaging's acquisition of China Type Design, a Hong Kong-based font design and production company, also illustrates Monotype Imaging's pledge to gain traction and expand business in emerging markets such as China, while collaborating with local experts.

A modular software library for composing, positioning and rendering text in multiple languages, Monotype Imaging's WorldType Layout Engine includes intelligence to automatically interpret linguistic traits that are part of complex writing systems such as Arabic, Hindi, Devanagari and Thai. Capabilities include bi-directional text flow, contextual character substitution and positioning, ligature and accent placement and the intermixing of text and graphics.

WorldType Layout Engine works with Monotype Imaging's iType font engine, a scalable subsystem based on TrueType and OpenType industry standards. The iType rasterizer also features support for Monotype Imaging's stroke-based fonts for Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages. Embedded within memory constrained devices, the iType font engine gives developers the ability to build products that can quickly generate highly legible text.