Stroke-based fonts are useful for memory-constrained applications (e.g., embedded systems) because they occupy a much smaller footprint than outline-based fonts and are also faster to render. For example, outline-based fonts containing the GB2312 character set often require well over 3 MB of storage, whereas the same character set can be represented compactly in a stroke-based font with only 250 KB. However, since each stroke has a uniform width, USFs lack the expressiveness and the cultural acceptance of their outline-based counterparts. Saffron supports an improved representation for stroke-based fonts called Stylized Stroke Fonts (SSFs) which provide the expressiveness of traditional outline-based fonts and the small memory footprint of USFs. For details, see “An Improved Representation for Stroke-based Fonts”, SIGGRAPH 2006 Conference Abstracts and Applications, Elena J. Jakubiak, Ronald N. Perry, and Sarah F. Frisken. Grid fitting Saffron features an automatic grid fitting system that aligns strong vertical and horizontal edges of glyphs to the pixel grid or to the sub-pixel grid. This grid fitting system provides better contrast, uniform stroke weights, and consistent characteristic distances. Standard Alignment Zones (SAZ) currently support several alphabets, including Arabic, Devanagari, Hebrew, Latin, and Thai. The SAZ grid fitting system requires no changes to existing typefaces and is particularly advantageous when hints are unavailable or have been removed to save space. Unhinted fonts typically occupy significantly less space than their hinted counterparts. Saffron also features an automatic Multiple Alignment Zone (MAZ) grid fitting system, which is optimized specifically for Asian character sets such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. MAZ grid fitting leads to dramatic improvements in rendering quality. The MAZ grid fitting system detects strong horizontal and vertical edges and aligns them to the pixel grid. The MAZ algorithms work with both outline-based fonts and stroke-based fonts, run dynamically during rendering, and operate fully automatically with no user parameters required. The program fully supports application-hinted glyphs, allowing applications to override Saffron's automatic grid fitting algorithms by using their own hints (e.g., TrueType hints) to perform grid fitting. Character simplification Chinese, Japanese, and Korean characters often contain many strokes which are difficult to render distinctly at small sizes. Simply aligning horizontal and vertical strokes to the pixel grid (e.g., by rounding each stroke to the nearest grid point) is not sufficient to produce a clear image. Saffron's MAZ grid fitting system performs character simplification (as needed) to ensure that each character remains clear and legible, even at