Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Mountain View, California - February 18, 1997 -
Bitstream Inc. (NASDAQ: BITS) and Netscape Communications Corporation (NASDAQ: NSCP) announced today that they will work together to jointly provide dynamic font support for users of Netscape Communicator client software. Users will now be able to view web pages and email messages as they were meant to be seen.

Netscape Communicator and Bitstream TrueDoc
Netscape will include Bitstream® TrueDoc® with Netscape Communicator^tm Standard Edition, an integrated suite of client software that includes the following:

• Netscape Navigator^tm for browsing


• Netscape Messenger^tm for open email


• Netscape Collabra^tm for discussion groups


• Netscape Composer^tm for HTML authoring


• Netscape Conference^tm for real-time collaboration

Bitstream TrueDoc, the award-winning font compression and portability technology, allows true viewing of fonts (including multilingual fonts) across various applications, platforms, operating systems, and devices, while maintaining the original look and feel of electronic documents on a variety of screens and printers.

Netscape will also include TrueDoc in Netscape Communicator Professional Edition, the premium version of Netscape Communicator. Besides containing all five components of the Standard Edition, the Professional Edition includes the following applications:

• Netscape Calendar for enterprise-wide scheduling


• Netscape AutoAdmin for centralized management from the Administration Kit


• Netscape IBM Host On-Demand 3270, a Java-based host component

Bitstream Extras That Netscape Will Also Include
Bitstream will also provide Netscape with

• Bitstream's TrueType® and PostScript^tm Type 1 font processors


• a selection of Bitstream typefaces, including four new fonts from Bitstream's new URL-series collection, fine tuned for screen legibility and readability


• Bitstream Cyberbit,^tm a multilingual Unicode font

What Bitstream and Netscape Executives Have to Say
"We are extremely pleased to enter into this agreement with Netscape Communications Corporation, a well-established leader in open software and Internet/intranet solutions," said Ray Boelig, president and chairman of Bitstream Inc. "The combination of Bitstream TrueDoc and Netscape Communicator is evidence of TrueDoc's significance and innovation. It will have a positive impact on the Internet's role as an international medium for business and personal communication."

"We are excited about working with Bitstream. Including Bitstream TrueDoc with Netscape Communicator will allow users to navigate through the web and communicate with dynamic font support," said Mike Homer, senior vice president of marketing at Netscape. "With international Internet usage increasing rapidly and multinational companies deploying intranets, Netscape is committed to addressing the global communication challenge and providing its users and developers with the tools that allow them to communicate in many different languages regularly and simultaneously."

Dynamic Font Support Now Possible
Until now, the Internet has remained limited in one fundamentally important mode of communication: the display of text. Web designers and authors were limited to a few common typefaces. You could not design a home page with a product or corporate typeface, because you had no guarantee that users viewing your document had the same font installed on their systems, or that they had the same device, application, or operating system.

This means you had to wrestle with image files (such as.GIFs or .JPEGs) or portable documents (such as .PDFs, .DPs, or .EVYs), which create large files that take time to download and, when displayed on the user's system, may still not look exactly like what you created in the first place. The disadvantages of these techniques are obvious. If you convert text to a graphic image, it loses its HTML text properties, such as the ability to search for key words. Saving pages as portable documents requires users to learn new applications. It also requires them to download and install extra plug-ins.

The incorporation of TrueDoc into Netscape Communicator solves this problem. TrueDoc makes fonts in HTML documents portable. Users of Netscape Communicator will be able to create web documents and email messages with any TrueType or PostScript Type 1 font. The character images will appear correctly when viewed--regardless of the fonts or font technologies resident on the user's system.

Support for International Fonts
TrueDoc supports a wide variety of fonts, including such non-Latin typefaces as Arabic, Chinese, Japanese (Kanji), and Korean. In addition, TrueDoc's portable font resources (PFRs) are extremely compact, greatly reducing the time it takes to download them.

When Netscape Will Include TrueDoc in Communicator
TrueDoc will be included in future beta versions of Netscape Communicator and in the upcoming commercial release.

Bitstream TrueDoc
Bitstream TrueDoc technology (U.S. Patents 5,577,177 and 5,583,978) is provided to hardware and software developers as a software development kit (SDK). TrueDoc offers OEMs and ISVs a font portability and compression solution that is extremely small in code size and provides superior screen quality, including anti-aliased output and subpixel positioning. TrueDoc records character shapes from the electronic documents an author creates, stores the shapes in a highly compressed manner, and recreates the characters for viewing.

Netscape Communications Corporation
Netscape Communications Corporation is a premier provider of open software for linking people and information over enterprise networks and the Internet. The company offers a full line of client and server software, development tools, and commercial applications to create a complete platform for next-generation, live, online applications. Traded on NASDAQ under the symbol "NSCP," Netscape Communications Corporation is based in Mountain View, California.

More Information
Visit these links for more information.

• Welcome, Netscape users and developers


• Other Bitstream press releases


• Bitstream home page


• Netscape home page