FreeType Downloads

Stable Releases

Stable releases of the FreeType packages, including source code, documentation, demo programs, and support tools can be downloaded directly from

or from

Both sites have mirrors worldwide.

The latest Freetype 1 release, today mainly of historical interest only, can be downloaded here. Other projects related to FreeType are only available as CVS source code modules; see the developer page for more details.

Development Versions

The gitlab instance of freedesktop.org provides snapshots of both the freetype.git and freetype-demos.git repositories.

Downloading and compiling a development snapshot (or using the git repositories directly) is one of the first things to do when you encounter something that looks like a bug in FreeType. Note that we do not guarantee that all development snapshots work on a given day, though such glitches should happen very rarely.

For more details on compilation from git, please read the file README.git, located in FreeType's top directory.

Support Tools and Binaries

GNU Make for Win32

You can build FreeType using MSYS2 tools, which includes GNU make and MinGW-w64 compilers. There are also binary pre-compiled MSYS2 packages of FreeType available.

Visual Studio Project Files

The FreeType source code bundle contains project files for various versions of Microsoft Visual C++ and Visual Studio for x64, Windows 32, and Windows CE. However, these files have been contributed and might be out of date, thus use them with care. Windows DLLs of FreeType compiled with Visual Studio can also be downloaded directly from a github repository.

CMake and Meson support files are provided in FreeType as alternative build options.

Last update: 02-Oct-2022