Saffron Type System
font rendering technology used in Adobe Flash
The Saffron Type System is a system for rendering high-quality scalable type on digital displays. It was developed by Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, and is built on a core of adaptively-sampled distance field (ADF) technology. Saffron has been licensed to Adobe and Monotype and is shipping in numerous products such as the Adobe Flash Player and Amazon Kindle. Saffron has been implemented in both software and hardware.
Principles
Antialiasing
Saffron performs anti-aliasing by first computing an explicit or implicit adaptively-sampled distance field (ADF) and then mapping distance values to densities. This renders beautiful curves, captures small details, and preserves the nuances of the original font design. Although only one distance sample is needed per pixel to achieve high-quality results, the program can use up to 3 samples per pixel to optimize image quality for LCD displays. The computation of a distance sample requires only linear interpolation and can be updated incrementally from pixel to pixel, thereby making the rendering process simple and efficient. For a more comprehensive treatment of distance-based anti-aliasing, see "A New Framework for Representing, Rendering, Editing, and Animating Type", Ronald N. Perry and Sarah F. Frisken, MERL, 2002.
Explicit and implicit ADFs
Saffron supports two types of ADFs for representing glyphs: explicit ADFs and implicit ADFs.
The public source identifies “Saffron Type System” as font rendering technology used in Adobe Flash. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Saffron, Type and System.
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