Bitstream Inc. was an American

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 ...

that produced digital

typeface A typeface (or font family) is a design of Letter (alphabet), letters, Numerical digit, numbers and other symbols, to be used in printing or for electronic display. Most typefaces include variations in size (e.g., 24 point), weight (e.g., light, ...

s. It was founded in 1981 by

Matthew Carter Matthew Carter (born 1 October 1937) is an English type designer.A Man of Letters

, Mike Parker, Cherie Cone, and Rob Friedman, all former employees of the

Mergenthaler Linotype Company The Mergenthaler Linotype Company was a company founded in the United States in 1886 to market the Linotype machine (), a system to cast metal type in lines (linecaster) invented by Ottmar Mergenthaler. It became the world's leading manufacturer ...

. It was located in

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

. 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 Im ...

, was acquired by

Monotype Imaging Monotype Imaging Holdings Inc., founded as Lanston Monotype Machine Company in 1887 in Philadelphia by Tolbert Lanston, is an American (historically Anglo-American) company that specializes in digital typesetting and typeface design for use wit ...

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 buyouts became noted phenomena of 19 ...

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 form of intellectual property that consists of a word, phrase, symbol, design, or a combination that identifies a Good (economics and accounting), product or Service (economics), service f ...

reasons) in digital form. For example, Times Ten was released as ''Dutch 801'',

Akzidenz-Grotesk Akzidenz-Grotesk is a sans-serif typeface family originally released by the Berthold Type Foundry of Berlin in 1898. ' indicates its intended use as a typeface for commercial print runs such as publicity, tickets and forms, as opposed to fine pr ...

as ''Gothic 725'',

Aurora An aurora ( aurorae or auroras), also commonly known as the northern lights (aurora borealis) or southern lights (aurora australis), is a natural light display in Earth's sky, predominantly observed in high-latitude regions (around the Arc ...

is ''News 706'', Antique Olive as ''Incised 901'',

Bembo Bembo is a serif typeface created by the British branch of the Monotype Imaging, Monotype Corporation in 1928–1929 and most commonly used for body text. It is a member of the "Serif#Old-style, old-style" of serif fonts, with its regular or ro ...

as ''Aldine 401'', Berthold Block as ''Gothic 821'', Bodoni Campanile as ''Modern 735'', Choc as ''Staccato 555'', Codex as ''Calligraphic 421'',

Cochin Kochi ( , ), formerly known as Cochin ( ), is a major port city along the Malabar Coast of India bordering the Laccadive Sea. It is part of the district of Ernakulam in the state of Kerala. The city is also commonly referred to as Ernaku ...

is ''Engravers' Oldstyle 205'',

Coronet In British heraldry, a coronet is a type of crown that is a mark of rank of non-reigning members of the royal family and peers. In other languages, this distinction is not made, and usually the same word for ''crown'' is used irrespective of ra ...

is ''Ribbon 131'', Eurostile as ''Square 721'', Frutiger as ''Humanist 777'',

Gill Sans Gill Sans is a Sans-serif#Humanist, humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Eric Gill and released by the British branch of Monotype Imaging, Monotype in 1928. It is based on Edward Johnston's 1916 "Johnston (typeface), Underground Alphabet", t ...

as ''Humanist 521'', Kabel as ''Geometric 231'', Memphis as ''GeoSlab 703'', Metro as ''Geometric 415'', Mistral is ''Staccato 222'', Melior is ''Zapf Elliptical'',

Optima Optima is a Humanist sans-serif, humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Hermann Zapf and released by the D. Stempel AG foundry, Frankfurt, West Germany in 1958. Though classified as a sans-serif, Optima has a subtle swelling at the terminals s ...

as ''Zapf Humanist'',

Oscar Oscar, OSCAR, or The Oscar may refer to: People and fictional and mythical characters * Oscar (given name), including lists of people and fictional characters named Oscar, Óscar or Oskar * Oscar (footballer, born 1954), Brazilian footballer ...

as ''Formal 436'', Old English Text is ''Cloister Black'', Peignot as ''Exotic 350'', Perpetua is ''Lapidary 333'', Plantin as ''Aldine 721'', Profil as ''Decorated 035'',

Palatino Palatino is an old-style serif typeface designed by Hermann Zapf, initially released in 1949 by the Stempel foundry and later by other companies, most notably the Mergenthaler Linotype Company. Palatino is optimised for legibility with open ...

as ''Zapf Calligraphic'', Rockwell is ''Geometric Slabserif 712'',

Syntax In linguistics, syntax ( ) is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure (constituenc ...

as ''Humanist 531'',

Torino Turin ( , ; ; , then ) is a city and an important business and cultural centre in northern Italy. It is the capital city of Piedmont and of the Metropolitan City of Turin, and was the first Italian capital from 1861 to 1865. The city is main ...

as ''Industrial 736'' and

Univers Univers () is a sans-serif typeface family designed by Adrian Frutiger and released by his employer Deberny & Peignot in 1957. Classified as a Grotesque (typeface classification), neo-grotesque sans-serif, one based on the model of nineteenth-cen ...

as ''Zurich''. The Bitstream font collection is most widely used through its inclusion with the

CorelDRAW CorelDRAW is a vector graphics editor developed and marketed by Alludo (formerly 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 progr ...

software, as well as other Corel products such as WordPerfect Office. 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 Amerigo, by Gerard Unger

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 ...

, by

Matthew Carter Matthew Carter (born 1 October 1937) is an English type designer.A Man of Letters

, Carmina by Gudrun Zapf, Chianti by Dennis Pasternak, Iowan Old Style by John Downer, Arrus by Richard Lipton and the

freeware Freeware is software, 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 free ...

Bitstream Vera Vera is a digital typeface (computer font) superfamily with a liberal license. It was designed by Jim Lyles from the now-defunct Bitstream Inc. type foundry, and it is closely based on Bitstream Prima, for which Lyles was also responsible. It i ...

family of fonts. One of their best known fonts is Swiss 721 BT, which is a

Helvetica Helvetica, also known by its original name Neue Haas Grotesk, is a widely-used sans-serif typeface developed in 1957 by Swiss typeface designer Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann. Helvetica is a neo-grotesque design, one influenced by the f ...

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, a font rasterizing 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 ( BICS).

History

The company had a high level of involvement in

BeOS BeOS is a discontinued operating system for personal computers that was developed by Be Inc. It was conceived for the company's BeBox personal computer which was released in 1995. BeOS was designed for multitasking, multithreading, and a graph ...

, 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 Times New Roman is a serif typeface commissioned for use by the British newspaper ''The Times'' in 1931. It has become one of the most popular typefaces of all time and is installed on most personal computers. The typeface was conceived by Stanl ...

and

Courier A courier is a person or organization that delivers a message, package or letter from one place or person to another place or person. Typically, a courier provides their courier service on a commercial contract basis; however, some couriers are ...

. 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 TrueType is an Computer font#Outline fonts, outline font standardization, standard developed by Apple Inc., Apple in the late 1980s as a competitor to Adobe Inc., Adobe's PostScript fonts#Type 1, Type 1 fonts used in PostScript. It has become the ...

, 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 Java Platform, Micro Edition or Java ME is a computing platform for development and deployment of porting, portable code for embedded system, embedded and mobile devices (micro-controllers, sensors, gateways, mobile phones, personal digita ...

-based

Web browser A web browser, often shortened to browser, is an application 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 scr ...

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 mobile network provider, mobile network carrier, mobile , wireless service provider, wireless carrier, wireless operator, wireless telco, or cellular company, is a telecommunications provider of se ...

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 Defunct software companies of the United States

Products

History

See also

References