Bitstream Inc. was a

type foundry A type foundry is a company that designs or distributes typefaces. Before digital typography, type foundries manufactured and sold metal and wood typefaces for hand typesetting, and matrices for line-casting machines like the Linotype and Mono ...

that produced digital

typeface A typeface (or font family) is the design of lettering that can include variations in size, weight (e.g. bold), slope (e.g. italic), width (e.g. condensed), and so on. Each of these variations of the typeface is a font. There are list of type ...

s. It was founded in 1981 by Matthew Carter and Mike Parker among others. It was located in

Marlborough, Massachusetts Marlborough is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. The population was 41,793 at the 2020 census. Marlborough became a prosperous industrial town in the 19th century and made the transition to high technology industry in the ...

. The font business, including

MyFonts MyFonts is a digital fonts distributor, based in Woburn, Massachusetts. It was created by Bitstream Inc., launched in September 1999 (during the ATypI conference in Boston), and started selling fonts in March 2000. In November 2011, Monotype Ima ...

, was acquired by Monotype Imaging in March 2012. The remainder of the business, responsible for Pageflex and Bolt Browser, was spun off to a new entity named Marlborough Software Development Holdings Inc. It was later renamed Pageflex, Inc following a successful

management buyout A management buyout (MBO) is a form of acquisition in which a company's existing managers acquire a large part, or all, of the company, whether from a parent company or individual. Management-, and/or leveraged buyout became noted phenomena of 1 ...

in December 2013.

Products

Bitstream created a library of "classic" fonts (usually under different names for

trademark A trademark (also written trade mark or trade-mark) is a type of intellectual property consisting of a recognizable sign, design, or expression that identifies products or services from a particular source and distinguishes them from others ...

reasons) in digital form (for example, Times Ten as 'Dutch 801'). The Bitstream font collection is most widely used through its inclusion with the

CorelDRAW CorelDRAW is a vector graphics editor developed and marketed by Corel Corporation. It is also the name of the Corel graphics suite, which includes the bitmap-image editor Corel Photo-Paint as well as other graphics-related programs (see below). T ...

software. The company received extensive criticism for its strategy of cheaply offering digitisations of pre-existing typefaces that it had not designed. While technically not illegal, font designer John Hudson would describe its selling of large numbers of typefaces on CD at discount prices as "one of the worst instances of piracy in the history of type". Bitstream developed a number of fonts on its own, such as

Charter A charter is the grant of authority or rights, stating that the granter formally recognizes the prerogative of the recipient to exercise the rights specified. It is implicit that the granter retains superiority (or sovereignty), and that the rec ...

, by Matthew Carter,

Iowan Old Style Iowan Old Style is a digital serif typeface designed by John Downer and released by Bitstream in 1991. Iowan Old Style is inspired by serif typefaces from Renaissance Italy, now called the “ old-style” or Venetian model of typeface design, ...

by John Downer and the

freeware Freeware is software, most often proprietary, that is distributed at no monetary cost to the end user. There is no agreed-upon set of rights, license, or EULA that defines ''freeware'' unambiguously; every publisher defines its own rules for the f ...

Bitstream Vera family of fonts. One of their best known fonts is Swiss 721 BT, which is a Helvetica clone with condensed versions and a rounded version. It was among the first digitally available Swiss family typefaces, being designed for that purpose in 1982. Another Bitstream product is

Font Fusion Bitstream Font Fusion is a small, fast, object-oriented font engine written in ANSI C capable of rendering high-quality text on any platform, any device, and at any resolution. The entire source code is portable, optimized, and executes independent ...

, a font

rasterizing In computer graphics, rasterisation (British English) or rasterization (American English) is the task of taking an image described in a vector graphics format (shapes) and converting it into a raster image (a series of pixels, dots or lines, whic ...

engine developed jointly with Type Solutions, Inc., which was later owned entirely by Bitstream. The multi-byte character set was named

Bitstream International Character Set The Bitstream International Character Set (BICS) was developed by Bitstream, Inc. Bitstream Inc. was a type foundry that produced digital typefaces. It was founded in 1981 by Matthew Carter and Mike Parker (typographer), Mike Parker among others. ...

( BICS).

History

The company had a high level of involvement in

BeOS BeOS is an operating system for personal computers first developed by Be Inc. in 1990. It was first written to run on BeBox hardware. BeOS was positioned as a multimedia platform that could be used by a substantial population of desktop users a ...

, with older BeOS releases using a Bitstream renderer, and the latest development releases from 2001 using Font Fusion. The OS, including its freeware releases, included a large number of Bitstream fonts, including their clones of Times New Roman, Helvetica and Courier. On December 2, 1998, Bitstream Inc. announced acquisition of all outstanding stock of Type Solutions, Inc. In addition, Sampo Kaasila, its founder and president and the creator of TrueType, agreed to join Bitstream's team as Director of Research and Development. In March 2000, Bitstream launched

, an open marketplace offering fonts from various foundries. In January 2009, Bitstream introduced the BOLT Browser, a Java ME-based

Web browser A web browser is application software for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's screen. Browsers are used on ...

for mobile phones. It was distributed free of charge to consumers and was built using the company's ThunderHawk mobile Web browsing technology for

mobile network operator A mobile network operator (MNO), also known as a wireless service provider, wireless carrier, cellular company, or mobile network carrier, is a provider of wireless communications services that owns or controls all the elements necessary to sell ...

s and handset manufacturers. The product was discontinued by the end of 2011.

References

{{Authority control Commercial type foundries Software companies based in Massachusetts Companies based in Cambridge, Massachusetts Design companies established in 1981 Software companies established in 1981 1981 establishments in Massachusetts Software companies disestablished in 2012 Companies formerly listed on the Nasdaq 2012 mergers and acquisitions Software companies of the United States

Products

History

See also

References