Agfa Monotype Licenses Fonts to Red Hat for Red Hat Enterprise Linux

WILMINGTON, Mass., Jan. 23, 2004 – Agfa Monotype Corp., a global provider of fonts and font technologies that today operate in millions of computers, printers and consumer electronics devices, has licensed fonts to Red Hat Inc. (Nasdaq: RHAT), the world’s leading provider of open source technologies for the enterprise.

Red Hat has licensed Agfa Monotype’s Albany, Cumberland and Thorndale typeface families, and a font that conforms to the Unicode 3.2 specification, Unicode’s latest international character encoding standard for multilingual digital information exchange. Unicode supports nearly 50 scripts and covers most of the world’s written languages.

“Rapid Linux adoption has created the demand for Agfa Monotype fonts in Linux,” said Steve Kuhlman, vice president and general manager of Agfa Monotype’s Display Imaging group. “Through our partnership with Red Hat, we’re able to ensure the availability of high-quality, highly legible fonts that work with the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system. Our fonts promote interoperability and deliver the necessary quality, integrity and performance that are critical in the day-to-day production and transmission of digital text.”

Albany, Cumberland and Thorndale are from Agfa Monotype’s library of delta-hinted, hand-tuned Enhanced Screen Quality fonts, designed for optimal legibility regardless of output destination, such as low-resolution inkjet printers or tiny cell phone screens. The fonts are also metrically equivalent to Arial, Courier and Times New Roman, core fonts of the Microsoft Windows operating system. Metric compatibility ensures correct text re-flow and positioning when exchanging documents between Windows and Red Hat systems, eliminating once common problems such as differing line endings, page breaks and character spacing. Red Hat users will also benefit from Agfa Monotype’s Unicode font, which prints or displays any character mapped to Unicode 3.2, allowing users to produce multilingual text without having to avoid certain characters that previously might not have been available to display or print.
“Agfa Monotype fonts are used throughout the world in all areas of text-based digital communication. This prompted Red Hat’s decision to work with Agfa Monotype, to provide high-quality fonts that work in a variety of environments to our global customer base,” said Mark Webbink, general counsel and senior vice president at Red Hat. “We will continue to work closely in the development of fonts that are compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux to address the needs of customers.”

Red Hat is licensing Agfa Monotype’s fonts to its customers through the Red Hat Network, a Web-accessible systems management platform for Linux that allows businesses to operate standards-based computing enterprises. The Red Hat Network is part of Red Hat’s Open Source Architecture, an initiative that includes Red Hat technology partners who work together building open source technologies that span operating systems, middleware, applications and management tools.

Additional information about the Red Hat Network and the Open Source Architecture is available at http://www.redhat.com/software/rhn/. Further information about Agfa Monotype’s Windows-compatible and Unicode-conformant fonts is available at http://www.agfamonotype.com/isv/newcore.asp and http://www.agfamonotype.com/isv/unicode.asp.

About Red Hat Inc.
Red Hat is the world’s premier open source and Linux provider. Red Hat is headquartered in Raleigh, N.C. and has offices worldwide. Additional information can be found at www.redhat.com.

About Agfa Monotype Corp.
Based in Wilmington, Mass. with regional offices in the U.K., Japan and China, Agfa Monotype specializes in fonts and font technologies for graphic professionals, software developers and manufacturers of printers and display devices. The company also provides printer drivers and imaging technologies to OEMs (original equipment manufacturers). Agfa Monotype is a wholly owned subsidiary of Agfa Corp. based in Ridgefield Park, N.J. and is part of Agfa’s Graphic Systems business unit. Agfa is the U.S. subsidiary of the Agfa-Gevaert Group, one of the world’s leading imaging companies. Agfa develops, produces and markets analog and digital systems primarily for the graphic imaging, healthcare, non-destructive testing, micrographic, and consumer desktop and photography markets. Headquartered in Mortsel, Belgium, Agfa has 40 national sales organizations globally, with worldwide sales of 4.683 billion euros in 2002. Additional information about Agfa Monotype and its products can be found on the company’s Web sites at www.agfamonotype.com, www.fonts.com, and www.agfamonotype.co.uk.

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