FreeType
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| Developer(s) | David Turner, Robert Wilhelm, Werner Lemberg and FreeType contributors |
|---|---|
| Initial release | 1996 |
| Stable release |
2.7.1 / December 30, 2016
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| Repository | git |
| Written in | C |
| Operating system | Cross-platform |
| Type | Software development library: Font rasterization |
| License | GNU General Public License / FreeType License |
| Website | www |
FreeType is a popular software development library used to render text onto bitmaps, and provides support for other font-related operations. The FreeType font rasterization engine is free and open source software with the source code dual-licensed under a BSD-like license and the GPL. FreeType supports a number of font formats, including TrueType, Type 1, and OpenType and "is designed to be small, efficient, highly customizable, and portable while capable of producing high-quality output (glyph images)."
Ability to access the embedding and subsetting restriction information of fonts was added in 2.3.8.
Support for applying a special filter to bitmaps generated by 'FT_Render_Glyph' if one of FT_RENDER_MODE_LCD and FT_RENDER_MODE_LCD_V has been selected was added in 2.3.0, while LCD-optimized rendering was disabled in all default builds of the library. LCD filter became normalized and color-balanced in 2.6.2.
Adobe's new SING Glyphlet format was introduced in FreeType 2.2.
TrueType name table loader supports 'buggy' Asian fonts was added in 2.1.1, which ignores empty name entries, invalid pointer offsets and a few other incorrect subtleties. In addition, name strings are now loaded on demand, which reduces the memory load of many faces. Support of managing UCS-4 character codes in CMap cache was added in 2.1.4-rc2. In 2.1.8, support of deinstallation of faces, delete all 'idle' nodes that correspond to a given FTC_FaceID. In the Type 1 loader, top-level dictionaries was properly skipped in 2.3.0 Ability to use fractional pixel sizes in the cache was added in 2.3.5. Ability to extract advance values of glyphs without loading their outlines was added in 2.3.8. Incremental font loading is enabled by default in 2.3.12.
FreeType was created in 1996 by David Turner to render TrueType fonts, including an interpreter for handling TrueType bytecode. Originally written in the Pascal programming language it was ported in 1997 by Robert Wilhelm to C. Later, Werner Lemberg joined the team who is until today maintainer of Freetype.
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