FreeType 2 Introduction

http://www.freetype.org

# An Introduction to FreeType 2

DOCUMENT INDEX: What is FreeType 2 ? Features Requirements Patents issues
## What is FreeType 2 ?
The FreeType project is a team of volunteers who develop free, portable and high-quality software solutions for digital typography. We specifically target embedded systems and focus on bringing small, efficient and ubiquitous products. the FreeType 2 library is our new software font engine. It has been designed to provide the following important features: A universal and simple API to manage font files: The FreeType 2 API is simple and easy to use. It supports both bitmapped and scalable fonts and is well-suited to manage font files of all formats. Unlike other font libraries, FreeType 2 returns and manages outline font data (images & metrics). Support for several font formats through loadable modules: FreeType 2 uses "font drivers". Each driver is a loadable module used to support one specific font format. Each driver can also provide specific extensions used to access format-specific features of the font. High-quality anti-aliasing: FreeType 2 produces etremely smooth outlines at small sizes, with its new anti-aliasing renderer, which produces bitmaps with 256-levels of gray. It uses a new algorithm that has been specifically designed to render small complex shapes (like glyphs) at high speed. Indeed, it's even faster than the monochrome renderer for small character sizes (under 20 pixels) !! High portability & performance: The FreeType 2 source code is written in ANSI C and runs on any platform with a compliant compiler. Client applications can provide their own memory manager or input stream to the library (which means that font files can come from any place: disk, memory, compressed file, network, etc..). Note that the beta of FreeType 2 is available now. For more info, check our Download page or see the source and its diffs through our CVS Web interface.
## Features
### Supported font formats FreeType 2 readily supports the following font formats: TrueType files (.ttf) and collections (.ttc) Type 1 font files both in ASCII (.pfa) or binary (.pfb) format Type 1 Multiple Master fonts. The FreeType 2 API also provides routines to manage design instances easily Type 1 CID-keyed fonts OpenType/CFF (.otf) fonts CFF/Type 2 fonts Adobe CEF fonts (.cef), used to embed fonts in SVG documents with the Adobe SVG viewer plugin. Windows FNT/FON bitmap fonts Note that Apple's TrueType GX fonts are supported as normal TTFs, (the advanced tables are ignored). Besides, it's possible to add support for new font formats by providing a specific font driver module. Modules can be added either at build time (when recompiling the library), or at run-time; this allows, for example, applications to register their own font driver to support program-specific formats. ### Patent-free automatic hinter TrueType fonts are normally renderered (hinted) with the help of a specific bytecode where the behaviour of a few opcodes is patented by Apple. We're currently in contact with Apple to discuss the importance of such patents and their use in open source projects like FreeType. In the meantime, we have developped our own alternative technology that is capable of automatically hinting scalable glyph images. It is now part of the FreeType 2 source tree as the "autohint" module, and is used to hint glyphs when the bytecode interpreter is disabled (through a configuration macro when building the engine). Note that the auto-hinter is also used to handle glyphs in other formats like CFF and Type 1. The auto-hinter provides pretty good results (in some cases, it even significantly improves the output of poorly hinted fonts) but we'll continue to improve it with each new release of FreeType to achieve the highest possible quality. ### Modular design: The design of FreeType 2 is extremely modular as most features are supported through optional modules. This means it's easily possible to only compile the features you need. As each module is between 10 and 20 Kb in size, it's possible to build a bare-bones font engine that supports anti-aliasing in about 30 Kb !! Configuration is performed by modifications of only two header files (one to select global features, another one to select modules) and don't need tweaking of source code. Note that it is however possible to provide your own implementation of certain components. For example, when building on Unix, the engine will automatically use memory-mapped files when available on the target platform, thus significantly increasing font file i/o. Due to its very flexible design, it is possible to add, remove and upgrade modules at run-time. ### Advanced glyph management The API comes with a standard extension used to extract individual glyph images from font files. These images can be bitmaps, scalable bezier outlines or even anything else. (e.g. bi-color or metafont glyphs, as long as they're supported by a module). Each scalable glyph image can be transformed, measured and rendered into a monochrome or anti-aliased bitmaps easily through a uniform interface. This allows client applications to easily cache glyphs or perform text rendering effects with minimal difficulty (look at the FreeType 2 Tutorial to see how to render rotated text with very few lines of code). ### Advanced font access The FreeType 2 API is useful to retrieve advanced information from various fonts: vertical metrics are available whenever found in the font file kerning distances are available when found in the font file. It is also possible to "attach" a given additional file to a given font face. This is useful to load kerning distances from an .afm file into a Type 1 face for example. provides ASCII glyph names whenever available in the font (TrueType, OpenType, Type1, etc..) provides access to important tables for SFNT-based font formats (i.e. TrueType, OpenType, CEF, etc..), like the name table, font header, maximum profile, etc... automatic synthesis of Unicode-based character maps for those fonts or formats that do not provide one. This is extremely useful with Type 1 fonts which are normally limited to a stupid 256-characters encoding. ### Simple & clean API The FreeType 2 high-level API is simple and straightforward, as it has been specifically designed to make the most commmon font operations easy As a comparison, the number of function calls needed to perform a the tasks of font face creation/opening and glyph loading/rendering has been reduced by a factor of 4 !! The API is also independent of any font-format specific issue, though it provides standard extensions to access format-specific tables and information. More extensions can also be easily added through new modules ### Robust & Portable code Because it is written in industry-standard ANSI C, FreeType 2 compiles on all platforms with a compliant compiler. Because the default build only relies on the C library, it is free of any system-specific dependencies, even if it is possible to "enhance" certain components by providing a specific implementation. The code doesn't use global or static variables. Client applications can provide their own memory manager. Font files can be read from a disk file, memory, or through a client-provided input stream. This allows to support compressed font files, remote fonts, fonts embedded in other streams (e.g. Type42 fonts), etc.. An advanced i/o sub-system is used to optimise file access, as well as reduce memory usage of the library when the file is memory-based ( ROM, RAM, memory-mapped ). ### Open Source & Vendor Independence Finally, FreeType 2 is released under its own BSD-like open source license, one of the less restricting licenses available, and this means that: It can be included in all kinds of products, be they proprietary or not. As any module can be added or replaced anytime, any third party vendor has the ability to provide its own set of modules (under its own license) in order to support proprietary font formats or more advanced features (e.g. a new auto-hinter, or a new anti-aliasing renderer for LCDs or TV screens). One could even imagine an application using the FreeType 2 API with a "wrapper" module used to access system-specific fonts (like through the Windows GDI). This would mean native font support with more portable application code (as simply changing the wrapper module would be required to port the application to another system).
## Requirements
FreeType 2 is written in ANSI C and should compile with no problems on a great variety of platforms. We have taken care of removing all compilation warnings from major compliant compilers. Detailed compilation instructions are provided in the software archive. This version of the library has been succesfully compiled and run under the following systems: Dos, OS/2, Windows, Macintosh, Unix (including the 64-bits DEC Unix, a.k.a. "True64"). You should not encounter major problems compiling it on any other kind of platform. In all cases, contact us if you do. Note that a small set of demonstration programs is also separately available. They include a tiny graphics sub-system that is used to display and show-off the library's capabilities on the following platforms: X11, MacOS, OS/2 & Windows. Please visit our Download section to access the software archives.
## Patents issues
The FreeType 2 source code includes a TrueType bytecode interpreter that is covered by the Apple patents. However, this piece of code is never compiled by default in this release (unlike in previous betas) making a default build of the library entirely patent-free !! Note that in order to compile the interpreter, one needs to define the configuration macro `TT_CONFIG_OPTION_BYTECODE_INTERPRETER` configuration macro in the file "`ftoption.h`". More details are available in the software archive. Note that the use of the interpreter is normally protected by US, UK and French patents. In the event you'd absolutely need it, you may have to contact Apple legal department for licensing conditions, depending on your location and the places you distribute/sell your products. Please do not ask us any detailed information regarding licensing, as we're still discussing with Apple this issue, we're unable to inform the public of what's currently going on..
Back to FreeType homepage