As the world becomes device-centric, many design engineers face a proliferation of low-end, small-screen product requirements that need big system performance.

Whether it's a portable medical instrument, wearable device, automobile cluster display or any number of Internet of Thing (IoT) devices, the functionality specifications are becoming more sophisticated and the text rendering performance needs to keep pace.

User expectations already are very unforgiving because of their experience with high-end devices, such as iPhones, so engineers are being asked to do more with less to make the screens look good, even on low-end devices.

Another important trend impacting display functionality is the increase in connectivity between devices of all types.

For example, even low-end devices streaming audio are now expected to display a variety of associated information (title, artist, genre, etc.) with clarity and responsiveness that meets high user expectations. In some cases, such as connected automobile clusters, navigation systems and medical devices, the need for text clarity and instant readability can be a crucial factor as well.

Until recently, designers generally have been forced to settle for a bitmap approach to displaying text and images on lower-end devices because of the overall constraints on system resources.

However, bitmap displays are no longer able to meet the evolving challenges. For example, connected devices must deal with a wider range of unpredictable text and more font sizes, which makes it much harder to pre-configure a sufficient range of bitmaps to deal with all situations.

In addition, today's global market environment requires built-in support for a wide range of languages including complex and bidirectional scripts that must be accurately and legibly rendered in different sizes as well. Bitmaps are particularly ill-suited for supporting complex scripts such as Arabic, Thai and Indic which require very accurate shaping to convey the proper meaning.

The need to support a widening range of languages and font sizes is also pushing the bitmap approach up against the tight resource constraints in low-end devices, because every combination of language, font size and style must be separately stored in local device memory.

Other key challenges with bitmaps include the R&D costs and hassles of maintaining different design approaches for low-to-mid level devices vs. the high-end devices that are almost always implemented with scalable font technology.

By: DocMemory
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