Bitstream Company History

Bitstream Inc. was founded in 1981 as the world's first independent digital type foundry, the first company to make fonts for new industry of digital typesetting. The company was founded by a group of experienced typographic professionals who were dedicated to a shared philosophy: that the industry needed a type vendor capable of delivering high quality fonts that worked beautifully on any device in any font format.

Fonts and Font Technology

At first, the company focused on building a library of well-crafted digital fonts based on classic font designs. The team built their fonts from the ground up using the earliest-generation specimens for each font as the basis for the digital version. This devotion to typographic excellence set the standard for a new and growing industry of digital typographers.

In the mid 1980s when Bitstream’s engineers suggested that they could render bitmaps at screen resolution without hand editing, the response from the digital typography industry was utter disbelief. Then they proceeded to do just that. What followed was a long line of continual innovations in font technology, all designed to improve rendering speed, readability and portability on resource-constrained systems with limited memory and screen resolution. In recent years, we expanded our font technology to include Font Fusion, a font renderer that provides the highest quality, fastest text output on any device, at any resolution, and Bitstream Panorama, a global text composition engine that enables developers and OEMs to lay out, position, substitute and render characters in all of the world's languages via a single company API. These technologies, combined with a wide variety of fonts, enable device manufacturers and application developers to render the highest quality text in any language, on any device, at any resolution in resource-constrained environments such as mobile phones, set top boxes, and embedded operating systems.

After going public in October 1996, Bitstream broadened its product offerings by starting the Pageflex product line and creating MyFonts.com.

Pageflex

Pageflex was an innovation. The company created a solution for automating page composition. The solution included a way for the elements on the page to grow and shrink depending on the amount and size of content they contained. Realizing this technology was a perfect answer to the challenges faced by the emerging variable data market, the company patented the concept and created the Pageflex product line in 1997. Right from the start, Pageflex was recognized as a strong technology capable of solving the "unsolvable" problems faced by people trying to create personalized communications.  Over the last several years, the product line was expanded to include Pageflex Storefront for creating online document ordering solutions (also known as "Web-to-Print" solutions), and Pageflex Campaign Manager for managing the complex world of multi-channel communications.

MyFonts

MyFonts was founded in 1999 to make it easy to find, try, and buy fonts. At the time, the only way to find fonts on the web was to know the name of the font you were looking for, or browse a flat alphabetical list. Making it hard to find and buy fonts for the average computer user meant turning away 99.9% of the potential market for fonts. MyFonts was created as an open marketplace, where fonts from many vendors could compete side-by-side, instead of the more typical single-company walled gardens of the 1980s and ’90s. Today, MyFonts offers 62,000 fonts from more than 500 foundries and over 1 million registered users who buy fonts on the site.

BOLT

After solving the problem of text rendering for mobile devices, it became clear that if we were to combine our proprietary text rendering solution with desktop-style web page rendering, we could create the ultimate mobile browsing experience. Thus, Bitstream’s mobile browsing division was born. Our mobile browsing software, initially named ThunderHawk, went through three complete overhauls and countless incremental improvements before culminating in today’s BOLT browser. Released in 2009, BOLT has been installed by millions of users worldwide since its release in February 2009. BOLT is compatible with the majority of the world’s 4 billion mobile phones and is built on a WebKit architecture that offers the most accurate desktop-style page rendering of any mobile browser. BOLT’s PC-level web support, streaming video support, patented split-screen viewing mode, intuitive keystroke shortcuts and copy/paste functionality offer a user-friendly, feature-rich mobile browsing experience on even entry-level mobile phones.

Today, Bitstream is a software development company that remains dedicated to providing industry-leading solutions that define the standard of excellence for all others to follow. The Bitstream family of software products has grown to include solutions for font technology, digital publishing, and mobile browsing. Each new development has built on the success and the experience of a team of professionals who still share that common philosophy about the kind of software developer the industry needs today.