FreeType
FreeType is a loosely available software library to render fonts.
It is written in C, designed to be petite, efficient, very customizable, and portable while capable of producing high-quality output (glyph pics) of most vector and bitmap font formats.
Some products that use FreeType for rendering fonts on screen or on paper, either exclusively or partially:
- GNU/Linux and other free Unix operating system derivates like FreeBSD or NetBSD;
- iOS, Apple’s mobile operating system for iPhones and iPads;
- Android, Google’s operating system for smartphones and tablet computers;
- ChromeOS, Google’s operating system for laptop computers;
- ReactOS, a free open source operating system based on the best design principles found in the Windows NT architecture;
- Ghostscript, a PostScript interpreter used in many printers.
Counting the above products only, you get more than a billion devices that contain FreeType.
News & Updates
The FreeType project was accepted to be part of Google Summer of Code 2017! Here’s a link to our ideas list – if you have another one, please write to our mailing list so that we can discuss your suggestions, eventually adding them to the list. And if you want to participate as a student, now is the time to discuss everything, again using the mailing list.
FreeType Two.8
FreeType Two.8 has been released. CFF2 support and OpenType variation font treating is now accomplish; the auto-hinter now understands twenty five more scripts, for example N’Ko and Tifinagh.
See here for a list of switches; noteworthy bug fixes are the treating of TrueType fonts: unhinted loading didn’t work as expected, and the light auto-hinter used incorrect metrics.
FreeType Two.7.1
FreeType Two.7.1 has been released. The most significant news is preliminary support of Adobe’s fresh CFF2 font format and variation fonts as specified in the fresh OpenType specification version 1.8. It also fixes the treating of raw CID fonts (which might be found in PDF files)
See here for a list of switches.
FreeType Two.7
We begin a fresh ‘minor` series, which ultimately permits us to activate a fresh default mode for bytecode hinting (see also the announcements below for version Two.6.Four and Two.6.Five): Subpixel hinting, also known as ClearType hinting.
In case you are already using subpixel hinting (for example, by using the ‘Infinality patches` as provided by some GNU/Linux or BSD distributions, or directly from bohoomil.com), be noted that the fresh mode might provide subtle differences; the code was simplified to make it much swifter. If you are used to the old full-pixel hinting, you will see many rendering switches. If you truly dislike them, you can disable them at compile time or using the fresh FREETYPE_PROPERTIES environment variable.
A description of the remaining switches can be found here, as usual.
FreeType Two.6.Five
This release is almost identical to the previous version, with two differences.
- It compiles again on Mac OS X, and
- it reverts the activation of subpixel hinting by default; it will be enabled by default in the forthcoming Two.7.x series. Main reason for reverting this feature is the principle of least surprise: a unexpected switch in appearance of all fonts (even if the rendering improves for almost all latest fonts) should not be expected in a fresh micro version of a series.
FreeType Two.6.Four
FreeType Two.6.Four has been released. The most significant switch is a fresh bytecode hinting mode for TrueType fonts that eventually activates subpixel hinting (a.k.a. ClearType hinting) by default.
The fresh release also brings support for the following fresh scripts in the auto-hinter: Armenian, Cherokee, Ethiopic, Georgian, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Malayalam, Sinhala, and Tamil.
See here for a detailed list of switches.
FreeType Two.6.Trio
FreeType Two.6.Three has been released. It brings support for four fresh Asian scripts in the auto-hinter (Khmer, Myanmar, Kannada, and Bengali), together with other, minor improvements and bug fixes.
See here for a detailed list of switches.
More on the Two.6.Two release for users and developers
FreeType Two.6.Two ships with three interesting details for users and developers of rendering libraries that deal with text. Read more.
FreeType Two.6.Two
FreeType Two.6.Two has been released. This is a minor release that mainly provides better treating of malformed fonts. All users should upgrade.
A fresh feature is stem darkening support for the auto-hinter. Note, however, that it is off by default, since most graphic systems don’t provide correct linear alpha blending with gamma correction, which is crucial for a good appearance. For the same reason, stem darkening for the CFF engine is now off by default, too.
See here for a more detailed list of switches.
FreeType Two.6.1
FreeType Two.6.1 has been released. This is a minor release that corrects problems with CFF metrics, and that provides better treating of malformed fonts. Two notably fresh features are auto-hinting support for the Lao script and a plain interface for accessing named instances in GX TrueType variation fonts.
See here for a list of switches.
FreeType Two.6
FreeType Two.6 has been released. This is a fresh major release that provides a better (and simpler) thread-safety model. Among other fresh features we now have auto-hinting support for Arabic and Thai, together with much improved treating of Apple’s GX TrueType variation font format.
See here for a list of switches.
FreeType Two.Five.Five
FreeType Two.Five.Five has been released. This is a minor bug fix release: All users of PCF fonts should update, since version Two.Five.Four introduced a bug that prevented reading of such font files if not compressed.
FreeType Two.Five.Four
FreeType Two.Five.Four has been released. All users should upgrade due to another fix for vulnerability CVE-2014-2240 in the CFF driver. The library also contains a fresh round of patches for better protection against malformed fonts.
The main fresh feature, which is also one of the targets mentioned in the pledgie roadmap below, is auto-hinting support for Devanagari and Telugu, two widely used Indic scripts. A more detailed description of the remaining switches and fixes can be found here.
Fresh Pledgie Campaign
This is a call for a fresh Pledgie campaign to support my (Werner Lemberg) expenses in 2014. Thanks to all donors, the last campaign was successful, and all goals have been reached!
If your company is using FreeType in your product, and you care about continuing support and further development, please contribute to my funding effort so I can proceed to bring the best text rendering to your devices!
Alternatively, direct donations to my PayPal account are also very welcome 🙂
Roadmap
Besides user support and fixing bugs, your money will help me implement the following issues.
- Setting up a test framework for FreeType. This is a fat, long-term undertaking that will ensure both stability and reliability of the library. The idea is to collect test cases (mainly cracked fonts) that cover as much source code as possible. Another idea to investigate is the development of scripts that can generate both valid and invalid input data to systematically increase the coverage of executed library code, including the unlikely cases. Eventually, pics of valid, well-rendered input fonts could be collected: As soon as a switch to the rendering photo gets applied, a comparison run with those pictures should detect rendering regressions.
- Further improvements to the auto-hinter. Right now, the module for Indic support is a dummy, and support for the family of Arabic scripts is entirely missing. [FreeType Two.6.1 comes with auto-hinting support for Devanagari, Telugu, Arabic, Thai, and Lao.] Both investigation and research is necessary to find out how much auto-hinting is possible and useful, and whether other, totally different scripts can be supported at all.
- Right now, rendering Type one and CID-keyed fonts is the weakest part of FreeType. However, we now have a brand-new module for treating CFF. Given that CFF is very similar to Type 1, it should be not too difficult to use and/or extend the CFF code so that Type one fonts can be treated, too.
- Explore whether it makes sense to merge FreeType with (parts of) the HarfBuzz library. Since version Two.Five.Three, FreeType already links to HarfBuzz to use its abilities for scanning OpenType layout features, and more integration might be sensible for both libraries.
- More improvements to this website. Last year I’ve redesigned the FreeType website. However, a large bunch of documents are still using the old design, and some of them are also no longer up to date. [As with version Two.6.0, the FreeType Tutorial has been updated.]
FreeType Two.Five.Trio
FreeType Two.Five.Three has been released. All users should upgrade due to immobilized vulnerability in the CFF driver (CVE-2014-2240).
Its main fresh feature is much enhanced support of auto-hinting SFNT fonts (i.e., TrueType and CFF fonts) due to the use of the HarfBuzz library. A more detailed description of this and other switches can be found here.
FreeType Two.Five.Two
FreeType Two.Five.Two has been released. It fixes a serious bug introduced in version Two.Five.1; all users should upgrade.
A listing of the switches can be found here.
FreeType Two.Five.1
FreeType Two.Five.1 has been released, providing three major fresh features.
- Support for the WOFF font format, contributed by Behdad Esfahbod.
- The auto-hinter now supports Hebrew, together with improved support for Cyrillic and Greek.
- The directory layout of the (installed) FreeType header files has been simplified.
Among other switches I want to mention that FreeType’s TrueType debugger (ttdebug) has been made more versatile. An exhaustive list of switches can be found here.
Pledgie Campaign Was Successful!
Thanks to a very generous donation by Pierre Arnaud from Epsitec, the pledgie campaign for FreeType has reached its purpose. I want to say thank you again to all donors! Of course, noone stops you from further donating to the campaign 🙂
After integration of Adobe’s CFF module and Google’s color emoji support, I will use the next months to work on the remaining issues that I’ve promised to implement. Stay tuned!
FreeType Two.Five
FreeType Two.Five has been released. A major fresh feature is support for color embedded bitmaps (eg. color emoji), contributed by Behdad Esfahbod on behalf of Google. Additionally, Adobe’s CFF engine is now the default, which makes a good reason to switch from the Two.Four.x to the Two.Five.x series.
On the technical side, the property API to access FreeType module parameters (FT_Property_Set and FT_Property_Get) is now proclaimed as stable.
As usual, see this file for the finish release notes, which give more details. And we have again blog entries from Adobe and Google.
[Please download the Two.Five.0.1 bundle of the FreeType library, which fixes a packaging error.]
FreeType Two.Four.12
FreeType Two.Four.12 has been released. A major fresh feature is a fresh parsing and hinting engine for CFF fonts, contributed by Adobe in collaboration with Google. It was my job the last few months to fully adapt the code to FreeType, and we are very pleased with the results. You might also read the blog entries from Adobe and Google.
In connection with the fresh CFF engine, the demo programs, especially ftview and ftdiff, have been improved a lot; as usual, more details on the switches can be found in the release notes.
I also want to say a big thank you to all the people who have already donated to the campaign! In particular I want to thank Adobe, which has contributed to half the total pledgie amount.
Pledgie Campaign for Development and Maintainance
I’ve embarked a pledgie campaign for FreeType development and maintainance. While no single company employs me (Werner Lemberg) directly to work on it, I am permanently improving it, adding fresh features, continually driving up quality, and responding to other developers’ requests.
If you or your company is using FreeType in your product, and you care about continuing support and further development, please contribute to my funding effort so I can proceed to bring the best text rendering to your devices!
Besides user support and fixing bugs, your money will help me implement the WOFF font format and extending FreeType’s auto-hinter to support more scripts, together with other issues as outlined in the roadmap.
FreeType Two.Four.11
FreeType Two.Four.11 has been released. This is partly a security release (for users of fonts in BDF format), but it also contains significant improvements:
- experimental support for TrueType subpixel hinting support, as documented in Microsoft’s whitepaper
- support for OpenType Collections
See this file for the accomplish release notes, which give more details.
Redesigned Homepage
The website has been redesigned, providing it a more latest look to enhance readability and to make navigation lighter. Note that only the two topmost levels have been switched yet; the remaining pages will go after.
FreeType Two.Four.Ten
FreeType Two.Four.Ten has been released. This is minor release, fixing mainly a problem for GhostScript. See this file for the release notes, which give more details.
FreeType Two.Four.9
FreeType Two.Four.9 has been released. This is mainly a security release, fixing many potential vulnerabilities. All users should upgrade. See this file for the release notes, which give more details.
FreeType Two.Four.8
FreeType Two.Four.8 has been released. This is a security release, also providing a fresh API for accessing dictionary data in Type one fonts. All users should upgrade. See this file for the release notes, which give more details.
FreeType Two.Four.7
FreeType Two.Four.7 has been released. This is a security release. All users should upgrade. See this file for the release notes, which give more details.
FreeType Two.Four.6
FreeType Two.Four.6 has been released. This is a security release. All users should upgrade. See this file for the release notes, which give more details.
FreeType Two.Four.Five
FreeType Two.Four.Five has been released. This is a maintainance release. All users should upgrade, especially if you still practice rendering degradations with version Two.Four.Four. See this file for the release notes, which give more details.
Links
The links collected in this section are useful if you want to put FreeType into a larger framework of understanding.
Reference Sites
Microsoft Typography – Microsoft’s OpenType specification and developing implements
Apple Fonts – Apple’s TrueType specification and other things
Adobe Typography – PostScript fonts specifications and developing instruments
Detailed information on the font formats supported by FreeType can be found in the file formats.txt, which is part of the FreeType source code bundle.
Font Implements
TTX – an OpenType assembler and disassembler
FontForge – a free, powerful graphical font editor, including a TrueType instructions debugger (using FreeType)
TrueTypeViewer – a free, powerful OpenType viewing implement with a TrueType instructions debugger (not using FreeType)
ttfautohint – a instrument to auto-hint TrueType fonts, based on FreeType’s auto-hinting engine (still under development)
Font Shaping and Layout Engines
These libraries work on top of font rendering libraries like FreeType to provide sophisticated text (string) layout, being able to treat OpenType features in particular. All of them use Unicode for font and text encoding.
Pango – the layout library used by Gnome’s GTK+ framework
ICU – a layout library originally developed by IBM, used for example in XeTeX, an internationalized successor of TeX
HarfBuzz – a text shaping library (still under intense development), originally based on FreeType 1’s OpenType layout support
Other Font-related Libraries
T1Lib – a Type one fonts library (no longer under development)
VFLib – a library especially for accessing TeX fonts (no longer under development)
This page is maintained by Werner Lemberg. The FreeType logo has been designed by Manuel Colom.
The FreeType Project
FreeType
FreeType is a loosely available software library to render fonts.
It is written in C, designed to be puny, efficient, very customizable, and portable while capable of producing high-quality output (glyph photos) of most vector and bitmap font formats.
Some products that use FreeType for rendering fonts on screen or on paper, either exclusively or partially:
- GNU/Linux and other free Unix operating system derivates like FreeBSD or NetBSD;
- iOS, Apple’s mobile operating system for iPhones and iPads;
- Android, Google’s operating system for smartphones and tablet computers;
- ChromeOS, Google’s operating system for laptop computers;
- ReactOS, a free open source operating system based on the best design principles found in the Windows NT architecture;
- Ghostscript, a PostScript interpreter used in many printers.
Counting the above products only, you get more than a billion devices that contain FreeType.
News & Updates
The FreeType project was accepted to be part of Google Summer of Code 2017! Here’s a link to our ideas list – if you have another one, please write to our mailing list so that we can discuss your suggestions, eventually adding them to the list. And if you want to participate as a student, now is the time to discuss everything, again using the mailing list.
FreeType Two.8
FreeType Two.8 has been released. CFF2 support and OpenType variation font treating is now finish; the auto-hinter now understands twenty five more scripts, for example N’Ko and Tifinagh.
See here for a list of switches; noteworthy bug fixes are the treating of TrueType fonts: unhinted loading didn’t work as expected, and the light auto-hinter used incorrect metrics.
FreeType Two.7.1
FreeType Two.7.1 has been released. The most significant news is preliminary support of Adobe’s fresh CFF2 font format and variation fonts as specified in the fresh OpenType specification version 1.8. It also fixes the treating of raw CID fonts (which might be found in PDF files)
See here for a list of switches.
FreeType Two.7
We embark a fresh ‘minor` series, which ultimately permits us to activate a fresh default mode for bytecode hinting (see also the announcements below for version Two.6.Four and Two.6.Five): Subpixel hinting, also known as ClearType hinting.
In case you are already using subpixel hinting (for example, by using the ‘Infinality patches` as provided by some GNU/Linux or BSD distributions, or directly from bohoomil.com), be noted that the fresh mode might provide subtle differences; the code was simplified to make it much swifter. If you are used to the old full-pixel hinting, you will see many rendering switches. If you indeed dislike them, you can disable them at compile time or using the fresh FREETYPE_PROPERTIES environment variable.
A description of the remaining switches can be found here, as usual.
FreeType Two.6.Five
This release is almost identical to the previous version, with two differences.
- It compiles again on Mac OS X, and
- it reverts the activation of subpixel hinting by default; it will be enabled by default in the forthcoming Two.7.x series. Main reason for reverting this feature is the principle of least surprise: a unexpected switch in appearance of all fonts (even if the rendering improves for almost all latest fonts) should not be expected in a fresh micro version of a series.
FreeType Two.6.Four
FreeType Two.6.Four has been released. The most significant switch is a fresh bytecode hinting mode for TrueType fonts that ultimately activates subpixel hinting (a.k.a. ClearType hinting) by default.
The fresh release also brings support for the following fresh scripts in the auto-hinter: Armenian, Cherokee, Ethiopic, Georgian, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Malayalam, Sinhala, and Tamil.
See here for a detailed list of switches.
FreeType Two.6.Three
FreeType Two.6.Three has been released. It brings support for four fresh Asian scripts in the auto-hinter (Khmer, Myanmar, Kannada, and Bengali), together with other, minor improvements and bug fixes.
See here for a detailed list of switches.
More on the Two.6.Two release for users and developers
FreeType Two.6.Two ships with three interesting details for users and developers of rendering libraries that deal with text. Read more.
FreeType Two.6.Two
FreeType Two.6.Two has been released. This is a minor release that mainly provides better treating of malformed fonts. All users should upgrade.
A fresh feature is stem darkening support for the auto-hinter. Note, however, that it is off by default, since most graphic systems don’t provide correct linear alpha blending with gamma correction, which is crucial for a good appearance. For the same reason, stem darkening for the CFF engine is now off by default, too.
See here for a more detailed list of switches.
FreeType Two.6.1
FreeType Two.6.1 has been released. This is a minor release that corrects problems with CFF metrics, and that provides better treating of malformed fonts. Two notably fresh features are auto-hinting support for the Lao script and a ordinary interface for accessing named instances in GX TrueType variation fonts.
See here for a list of switches.
FreeType Two.6
FreeType Two.6 has been released. This is a fresh major release that provides a better (and simpler) thread-safety model. Among other fresh features we now have auto-hinting support for Arabic and Thai, together with much improved treating of Apple’s GX TrueType variation font format.
See here for a list of switches.
FreeType Two.Five.Five
FreeType Two.Five.Five has been released. This is a minor bug fix release: All users of PCF fonts should update, since version Two.Five.Four introduced a bug that prevented reading of such font files if not compressed.
FreeType Two.Five.Four
FreeType Two.Five.Four has been released. All users should upgrade due to another fix for vulnerability CVE-2014-2240 in the CFF driver. The library also contains a fresh round of patches for better protection against malformed fonts.
The main fresh feature, which is also one of the targets mentioned in the pledgie roadmap below, is auto-hinting support for Devanagari and Telugu, two widely used Indic scripts. A more detailed description of the remaining switches and fixes can be found here.
Fresh Pledgie Campaign
This is a call for a fresh Pledgie campaign to support my (Werner Lemberg) expenses in 2014. Thanks to all donors, the last campaign was successful, and all goals have been reached!
If your company is using FreeType in your product, and you care about continuing support and further development, please contribute to my funding effort so I can proceed to bring the best text rendering to your devices!
Alternatively, direct donations to my PayPal account are also very welcome 🙂
Roadmap
Besides user support and fixing bugs, your money will help me implement the following issues.
- Setting up a test framework for FreeType. This is a large, long-term undertaking that will ensure both stability and reliability of the library. The idea is to collect test cases (mainly violated fonts) that cover as much source code as possible. Another idea to investigate is the development of scripts that can generate both valid and invalid input data to systematically increase the coverage of executed library code, including the unlikely cases. Eventually, pics of valid, well-rendered input fonts could be collected: As soon as a switch to the rendering pic gets applied, a comparison run with those photos should detect rendering regressions.
- Further improvements to the auto-hinter. Right now, the module for Indic support is a dummy, and support for the family of Arabic scripts is totally missing. [FreeType Two.6.1 comes with auto-hinting support for Devanagari, Telugu, Arabic, Thai, and Lao.] Both investigation and research is necessary to find out how much auto-hinting is possible and useful, and whether other, totally different scripts can be supported at all.
- Right now, rendering Type one and CID-keyed fonts is the weakest part of FreeType. However, we now have a brand-new module for treating CFF. Given that CFF is very similar to Type 1, it should be not too difficult to use and/or extend the CFF code so that Type one fonts can be treated, too.
- Explore whether it makes sense to merge FreeType with (parts of) the HarfBuzz library. Since version Two.Five.Trio, FreeType already links to HarfBuzz to use its abilities for scanning OpenType layout features, and more integration might be sensible for both libraries.
- More improvements to this website. Last year I’ve redesigned the FreeType website. However, a large bunch of documents are still using the old design, and some of them are also no longer up to date. [As with version Two.6.0, the FreeType Tutorial has been updated.]
FreeType Two.Five.Three
FreeType Two.Five.Three has been released. All users should upgrade due to immobile vulnerability in the CFF driver (CVE-2014-2240).
Its main fresh feature is much enhanced support of auto-hinting SFNT fonts (i.e., TrueType and CFF fonts) due to the use of the HarfBuzz library. A more detailed description of this and other switches can be found here.
FreeType Two.Five.Two
FreeType Two.Five.Two has been released. It fixes a serious bug introduced in version Two.Five.1; all users should upgrade.
A listing of the switches can be found here.
FreeType Two.Five.1
FreeType Two.Five.1 has been released, providing three major fresh features.
- Support for the WOFF font format, contributed by Behdad Esfahbod.
- The auto-hinter now supports Hebrew, together with improved support for Cyrillic and Greek.
- The directory layout of the (installed) FreeType header files has been simplified.
Among other switches I want to mention that FreeType’s TrueType debugger (ttdebug) has been made more versatile. An exhaustive list of switches can be found here.
Pledgie Campaign Was Successful!
Thanks to a very generous donation by Pierre Arnaud from Epsitec, the pledgie campaign for FreeType has reached its purpose. I want to say thank you again to all donors! Of course, noone stops you from further donating to the campaign 🙂
After integration of Adobe’s CFF module and Google’s color emoji support, I will use the next months to work on the remaining issues that I’ve promised to implement. Stay tuned!
FreeType Two.Five
FreeType Two.Five has been released. A major fresh feature is support for color embedded bitmaps (eg. color emoji), contributed by Behdad Esfahbod on behalf of Google. Additionally, Adobe’s CFF engine is now the default, which makes a good reason to switch from the Two.Four.x to the Two.Five.x series.
On the technical side, the property API to access FreeType module parameters (FT_Property_Set and FT_Property_Get) is now announced as stable.
As usual, see this file for the finish release notes, which give more details. And we have again blog entries from Adobe and Google.
[Please download the Two.Five.0.1 bundle of the FreeType library, which fixes a packaging error.]
FreeType Two.Four.12
FreeType Two.Four.12 has been released. A major fresh feature is a fresh parsing and hinting engine for CFF fonts, contributed by Adobe in collaboration with Google. It was my job the last few months to fully adapt the code to FreeType, and we are very pleased with the results. You might also read the blog entries from Adobe and Google.
In connection with the fresh CFF engine, the demo programs, especially ftview and ftdiff, have been improved a lot; as usual, more details on the switches can be found in the release notes.
I also want to say a big thank you to all the people who have already donated to the campaign! In particular I want to thank Adobe, which has contributed to half the total pledgie amount.
Pledgie Campaign for Development and Maintainance
I’ve embarked a pledgie campaign for FreeType development and maintainance. While no single company employs me (Werner Lemberg) directly to work on it, I am permanently improving it, adding fresh features, continuously driving up quality, and responding to other developers’ requests.
If you or your company is using FreeType in your product, and you care about continuing support and further development, please contribute to my funding effort so I can proceed to bring the best text rendering to your devices!
Besides user support and fixing bugs, your money will help me implement the WOFF font format and extending FreeType’s auto-hinter to support more scripts, together with other issues as outlined in the roadmap.
FreeType Two.Four.11
FreeType Two.Four.11 has been released. This is partly a security release (for users of fonts in BDF format), but it also contains significant improvements:
- experimental support for TrueType subpixel hinting support, as documented in Microsoft’s whitepaper
- support for OpenType Collections
See this file for the finish release notes, which give more details.
Redesigned Homepage
The website has been redesigned, providing it a more latest look to enhance readability and to make navigation lighter. Note that only the two topmost levels have been switched yet; the remaining pages will go after.
FreeType Two.Four.Ten
FreeType Two.Four.Ten has been released. This is minor release, fixing mainly a problem for GhostScript. See this file for the release notes, which give more details.
FreeType Two.Four.9
FreeType Two.Four.9 has been released. This is mainly a security release, fixing many potential vulnerabilities. All users should upgrade. See this file for the release notes, which give more details.
FreeType Two.Four.8
FreeType Two.Four.8 has been released. This is a security release, also providing a fresh API for accessing dictionary data in Type one fonts. All users should upgrade. See this file for the release notes, which give more details.
FreeType Two.Four.7
FreeType Two.Four.7 has been released. This is a security release. All users should upgrade. See this file for the release notes, which give more details.
FreeType Two.Four.6
FreeType Two.Four.6 has been released. This is a security release. All users should upgrade. See this file for the release notes, which give more details.
FreeType Two.Four.Five
FreeType Two.Four.Five has been released. This is a maintainance release. All users should upgrade, especially if you still practice rendering degradations with version Two.Four.Four. See this file for the release notes, which give more details.
Links
The links collected in this section are useful if you want to put FreeType into a larger framework of understanding.
Reference Sites
Microsoft Typography – Microsoft’s OpenType specification and developing instruments
Apple Fonts – Apple’s TrueType specification and other things
Adobe Typography – PostScript fonts specifications and developing instruments
Detailed information on the font formats supported by FreeType can be found in the file formats.txt, which is part of the FreeType source code bundle.
Font Devices
TTX – an OpenType assembler and disassembler
FontForge – a free, powerful graphical font editor, including a TrueType instructions debugger (using FreeType)
TrueTypeViewer – a free, powerful OpenType viewing implement with a TrueType instructions debugger (not using FreeType)
ttfautohint – a device to auto-hint TrueType fonts, based on FreeType’s auto-hinting engine (still under development)
Font Shaping and Layout Engines
These libraries work on top of font rendering libraries like FreeType to provide sophisticated text (string) layout, being able to treat OpenType features in particular. All of them use Unicode for font and text encoding.
Pango – the layout library used by Gnome’s GTK+ framework
ICU – a layout library originally developed by IBM, used for example in XeTeX, an internationalized successor of TeX
HarfBuzz – a text shaping library (still under mighty development), originally based on FreeType 1’s OpenType layout support
Other Font-related Libraries
T1Lib – a Type one fonts library (no longer under development)
VFLib – a library especially for accessing TeX fonts (no longer under development)
This page is maintained by Werner Lemberg. The FreeType logo has been designed by Manuel Colom.