Brian Kiel

Pronounced like “chimera”, and modeled after said word… Kimera GPS (“glyph pack system”) is the codename for a process I created wherein “font-packs” are compiled on-demand by the server and fed to dynamic display ads in the wild.

Whilst creating dynamic display ads (using Oxford) for eBay, projects would arise where we would need to develop creative for the eBay Partner Network.  This meant that the ads would be showing headlines and other text in languages other than english.  Each time one of these projects rolled down, we would get a list of the countries/languages which we would be developing ads for, and invariably, one of those languages would be Chinese.  Luckily, Chinese was always amongst the languages REMOVED from the list before entering development, but the specter of having to create ads capable of displaying asian charactersets always hung over my head.

More about this here.

Kimera is a process wherein, when an ad loads in the wild, after receiving its configuration information (containing its desired text to display) the ad then contacts the Kimera-enabled server, tells it what text it intends to display, the server (which possesses the full characterset) then generates a swf which contains the embedded font outlines for ONLY the glyphs that are to be displayed in the ad.

For ads using the Latin-I characterset, this results in font-outline bytesize dropping to ~2k (from the aforementioned 10k)  The bytesize savings when dealing with other charactersets are even larger.  Above all, it actually makes the idea of creating dynamic display ads for asian languages not just possible but executable with near-english bytesize results.

+ Flash development
+ PHP development
+ system architecture

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 9th, 2008 at 08:49. It is filed under Spare Time, Work and tagged with AS2, AS3, banners, dynamic display advertising, Flash, fonts, HaXe, php, SWFMill. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.