FreeType

FreeType is a freely available software library to render fonts.

It is written in C, designed to be small, efficient, highly customizable, and portable while capable of producing high-quality output (glyph images) of most vector and bitmap font formats.

Some products which 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
• Ghostscript, a PostScript interpreter used in many printers

Counting the above products only, you get more than a billion devices which contain FreeType.

News & Updates

FreeType 2.5

FreeType 2.5 has been released. A major new 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 change from the 2.4.x to the 2.5.x series.

On the technical side, the property API to access FreeType module parameters (FT_Property_Set and FT_Property_Get) is now declared as stable.

As usual, see this file for the complete release notes which give more details. And we have again blog entries from Adobe and Google.

[Please download the 2.5.0.1 bundle of the FreeType library which fixes a packaging error.]

FreeType 2.4.12

FreeType 2.4.12 has been released. A major new feature is a new 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 new CFF engine, the demo programs, especially ftview and ftdiff, have been improved a lot; as usual, more details on the changes 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 started a pledgie campaign for FreeType development and maintainance. While no single company employs me (Werner Lemberg) directly to work on it, I am constantly improving it, adding new features, relentlessly 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 continue 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 2.4.11

FreeType 2.4.11 has been released. This is partly a security release (for users of fonts in BDF format), but it also contains important improvements:

• experimental support for TrueType subpixel hinting support, as documented in Microsoft's whitepaper
• support for OpenType Collections

See this file for the complete release notes which give more details.

Redesigned Homepage

The website has been redesigned, giving it a more recent look to enhance readability and to make navigation easier. Note that only the two topmost levels have been changed yet; the remaining pages will follow.

FreeType 2.4.10

FreeType 2.4.10 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 2.4.9

FreeType 2.4.9 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 2.4.8

FreeType 2.4.8 has been released. This is a security release, also providing a new API for accessing dictionary data in Type 1 fonts. All users should upgrade. See this file for the release notes which give more details.

FreeType 2.4.7

FreeType 2.4.7 has been released. This is a security release. All users should upgrade. See this file for the release notes which give more details.

FreeType 2.4.6

FreeType 2.4.6 has been released. This is a security release. All users should upgrade. See this file for the release notes which give more details.

FreeType 2.4.5

FreeType 2.4.5 has been released. This is a maintainance release. All users should upgrade, especially if you still experience rendering degradations with version 2.4.4. 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 frame of understanding.

Reference Sites

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 Tools

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 handle OpenType features in particular. All of them use Unicode for font and text encoding.

Other Font-related Libraries