It was developed by Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, and is built on a core of adaptively-sampled distance field (ADF) technology.
This renders beautiful curves, captures small details, and preserves the nuances of the original font design.
For a more comprehensive treatment of distance-based anti-aliasing, see "A New Framework for Representing, Rendering, Editing, and Animating Type", Ronald N. Perry and Sarah F. Frisken, MERL, 2002.
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.
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.
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.