Font and Text Services Collection

The Font and Text Services Collection contains the Font Store and related plug-ins and the Text Rendering component. Application developers can select fonts from the Font Store. Device creators can create and add fonts.

Figure 1. The Font and Text Services collection

• Font and Text Services Collection Overview
  A font is a set of characters of matching size (height) and appearance. In order to be displayed each character must ultimately be drawn as a series of pixels (a bitmap). Symbian can store fonts in bitmap or vector form. A vector font (for example, an OpenType font) must be converted to bitmaps (or rasterized) before it can be drawn. Symbian caches and shares bitmaps for performance and memory efficiency.
• Font and Text Services Tutorials
  You can use the Font and Text Services to select a font or typeface for your text.
• Font Store Component
  The Font Store is encapsulated by the Font and Bitmap Server. It represents all of the fonts stored as files in the file system. Font files may be of the native Symbian bitmap format or they may require rasterising into bitmaps. Font rasterisers are ECOM plug-ins to the Font Store.
• ICU Layout Engine Component
  The ICU Layout Engine component is a plug-in to the Font Store that wraps the ICU (International Components for Unicode) layout engine. This performs contextual shaping for specific scripts that require this feature.
• FreeType Font Rasterizer Component Overview
  The FreeType Font Rasterizer is a plug-in to the Font Store. It interprets open font files and generates native Symbian bitmap font characters. It is an optional replaceable component, which means that it may be used or replaced by device creators.