The electronic version of this International Standard can be downloaded from the ISO/IEC Information Technology Task Force (ITTF) web site.

This part of ISO/IEC 14496 specifies the Composite Font Representation, an XML-based document format that allows combining individual component font resources into a single virtual font. Recent advances in developing the Unicode Standard and the addition of new characters that represent most of the world's languages and writing systems have resulted in a significant increase of the Unicode character repertoire, and this process is likely to continue in the future. Therefore, the ability to combine a number of individual fonts supporting different languages and Unicode ranges in a single virtual font description provides the opportunity for various users and creators of multimedia, graphics and textual content to support all of the world's languages and utilize the existing font rendering solutions that are implemented in current computing platforms and deployed in many existing devices.