Agfa Monotype Licenses iType™ to ANT for Fresco Browser

New partnership provides enhanced browser capabilities to consumer electronics market

Las Vegas, Nevada (Consumer Electronics Show), 9 January 2002

Agfa Monotype Corporation, a global provider of fonts and font technologies, and ANT Limited, a major developer of Internet appliance software worldwide, today announced that ANT has licensed iType for ANT's Fresco browser. The long-term agreement enables ANT to offer its customers immediate access to Agfa Monotype's iType font rendering technology and vast collection of fonts designed for optimal legibility on digital communication devices and systems.

"ANT has been increasing its presence in the set-top-box and consumer electronic markets, and this relationship reinforces Agfa Monotype's commitment to meeting the font requirements of these markets," said Doug Shaw, senior vice president of Agfa Monotype's OEM business unit. "With iType now a part of the Fresco browser, OEMs are able to use our fonts right away without worrying about porting or integration issues."

"We are dedicated to offering our customers feature-rich products, and the inclusion of iType is further proof of this," said Jon Hoskin, chief operating officer of ANT Limited. "iType is a reliable and proven technology that is continually being enhanced to meet the maturing needs of the market, and we are pleased to offer it as part of the ANT Fresco product."

Agfa Monotype's iType

iType is a highly compact, extremely portable font scaling technology that allows for the generation of characters at virtually any point size. By integrating iType in memory-constrained environments such as those in set-top boxes, Internet appliances and smart phones, OEMs are able to build products that can quickly generate high-quality text for on-screen displays.

iType has two main components: a high-speed TrueType® font rasterizer and a suite of fonts. OEMs can select from four prepackaged font sets: a Microsoft® Windows® -compatible core set that provides metrically equivalent designs; a collection of high-quality, delta-hinted display fonts engineered for optimal readability on television screens; a TV font pack that meets FCC requirements (EIA-708B standard) for closed captioning on analog and digital TVs; and Agfa Monotype's stroke-based package, a set of composite Asian fonts that allows OEMs to meet stringent code requirements while achieving storage savings of 90 percent. OEMs can also work with Agfa Monotype to implement custom fonts, or select from the company's comprehensive selection of over 1,000 TrueType fonts.

Additional features of iType include embedded bitmap font support for enhanced screen quality at smaller point sizes, character caching for improved character generation performance, concurrent disk/ROM support for dynamically storing additional fonts, and television closed-captioning capabilities for meeting FCC requirements as outlined in the Electronics Industries Alliance specification (EIA-708B).

ANT's Fresco Browser

The ANT browser is based on a unique, patent pending, three-layered architecture consisting of the ANT Portability Environment (APE), which manages the interface to the hardware platform; the core standards compliant browser code; and a graphical user interface. This allows the parallel development of the major elements in product design, so that graphic designers can work on the user interface at the same time as the device OEM is designing and integrating the technology.

About Agfa Monotype Corporation

Agfa Monotype Corporation is a major provider of digital content for graphics professionals. The company is a recognized leader in fonts and font technologies and an innovator in color and screening technologies. Agfa Monotype is a wholly owned subsidiary of Agfa Corporation and is part of Agfa's Graphic Systems business unit. Agfa Corporation is part of the Agfa-Gevaert Group, one of the world's leading imaging companies, headquartered in Mortsel, Belgium. Agfa develops, produces and markets analogue and digital systems, primarily for the graphics, medical imaging, non-destructive testing and consumer imaging and photography markets. Worldwide, sales for 2000 were 5.26 billion euros. In the U.S., Agfa is headquartered in Ridgefield Park, N.J. and employs approximately 4,000 people. Additional information about Agfa Monotype and its products can be found on the company's Web sites at www.agfamonotype.com and www.fonts.com.

Type is a trademark of Agfa Monotype Corporation.

About ANT Software Limited

ANT plc (www.antplc.com) is a leading provider of digital TV client and consumer electronic software solutions. ANT's unique client solutions allow robust and consistent delivery of digital-media, user interfaces, interactive services and applications to the TV and portable media devices. ANT enables service providers to efficiently create and deploy successful solutions to the market that deliver high value and clear differentiation.

ANT's products are pre-integrated with many industry-leading solutions and are based upon open standards, enabling low-risk, cost-effective roll-out of services, while ensuring flexible client hardware choice with efficient bill of materials. ANT software has been extensively deployed by customers throughout the world including Chunghwa Telecom, Foxconn, France Telecom, Humax, LG/Nortel, Philips, Sagem, Samsung, SaskTel, Telecom Italia and Thomson.

ANT plc's shares are listed on AIM, a London Stock Exchange regulated market, under the ticker ANTP (Reuters: ANTP.L, Bloomberg: ANTP.LN).

Trademarks

ANT, the ANT logo, Galio, Fresco and PurePlay are all trademarks or registered trademarks of ANT Software Limited. All other brand and product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.

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