freetype2-2.1.3: description + notes
The FreeType engine (libfreetype.so -- if you need libttf.so load the version 1 fw_freetype package) is a free and portable TrueType font rendering engine. It has been developed to provide TT support to a great variety of platforms and environments. The Freetype Project home page has more details.

Note that FreeType is a library. It is not a font server for your favorite platform, even though it was designed to be used in many of them. Note also that it is not a complete text-rendering library. Its purpose is simply to open and manage font files, as well as load, hint and render individual glyphs efficiently. You can also see it as a "TrueType driver" for a higher-level library, though rendering text with it is easy, as demonstrated by the test programs.

FreeType is a clean-room implementation that is not derived from the original TrueType engine developed by Apple and Microsoft. It has been created with the sole help of the published TrueType specifications, which to our great surprise (and pain) turned out to be extremely poor or misleading in critical areas. Much hard work has been undertaken to solve ambiguities. The end result is a portable and fast renderer.

Its quality matches that of Windows and the Macintosh, while its memory foot-print and code size (between 48 and 55 kByte of Intel code) remain modest. A thing that cannot be said for most other commercial engines available.

Developers intending to use this distribution for application development should be sure to read the information in FAQ 3.8.

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