Bitstream Inc.

The company had a high level of involvement in BeOS, with older BeOS releases using a Bitstream renderer, and the latest development releases from 2001 using Font Fusion. The OS, including its freeware releases, included a large number of Bitstream fonts, including their versions of Times New Roman, Helvetica and Courier.

On December 2, 1998, Bitstream Inc. announced acquisition of all outstanding stock of Type Solutions, Inc. In addition, Sampo Kaasila, its founder and president and the creator of TrueType, agreed to join Bitstream's team as Director of Research and Development.

In January 1999, Bitstream launched MyFonts, an open marketplace offering fonts from various foundries and a forum where users could interact with type experts.

In January 2009, Bitstream introduced the BOLT Browser, a Java ME-based Web browser for mobile phones. It was distributed free of charge to consumers and was built using the company's ThunderHawk mobile Web browsing technology for mobile network operators and handset manufacturers. The product was discontinued by the end of 2011.

Bitstream created a library of "classic" digital fonts, usually under different names, initially drawing from the Linotype library. For example, Times Ten was released as Dutch 801, Bembo as Aldine 401, Eurostile as Square 721, Frutiger as Humanist 777, Gill Sans as Humanist 521, and Univers as Zurich. In the United States, while the names of typefaces can be trademarked, the typefaces themselves are not copyrightable, allowing anyone to digitize existing fonts and redistribute them under a new name. While a success, Bitstream received criticism for its strategy of cheaply offering digitizations of pre-existing typefaces that it had not designed, with font designer John Hudson saying that "the development of the original Bitstream library was one of the worst instances of piracy in the history of type." The company distributed fonts with metrics matching PostScript fonts, making it possible for output from software clones of PostScript to match the original. The Bitstream font collection became widely used through its inclusion with the CorelDRAW software, as well as other Corel products such as WordPerfect.

Bitstream also developed a number of original fonts, such as Amerigo, by Gerard Unger Charter, by Matthew Carter, Carmina by Gudrun Zapf, Chianti by Dennis Pasternak, Iowan Old Style by John Downer, Arrus by Richard Lipton and the open source Bitstream Vera family of fonts.

One of their best known fonts is Swiss 721 BT, which is a Helvetica variant with condensed versions and a rounded version. It was among the first digitally available Swiss family typefaces, being designed for that purpose in 1982.

Another Bitstream product is Font Fusion, a font rasterizing engine developed jointly with Type Solutions, Inc., which was later owned entirely by Bitstream.