[3528] in comp.os.os2.announce archive
FREEWARE: FreeType public beta - a free TrueType library
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (David Turner)
Thu Oct 30 20:08:02 1997
To: os2ann.DISCUSS@bloom-picayune.MIT.EDU
Date: 30 Oct 1997 18:06:00 -0400
From: turner@Email.ENST.Fr (David Turner)
Reply-To: turner@Email.ENST.Fr (David Turner)
Reply-to: turner@Email.ENST.Fr (David Turner)
[Followups directed to comp.os.os2.utilities]
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Welcome to the
F R E E T Y P E P R O J E C T
The Public Beta!
The FREE TrueType Font Engine
Copyright 1996 David Turner <turner@enst.fr>
- 1997 Robert Wilhelm <robert@physiol.med.tu-muenchen.de>
Werner Lemberg <a7971428@unet.univie.ac.at>
The FreeType engine 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, including OS/2.
Notice that FreeType is a *library*. It is *not* a font server
for your preferred environment, even though it was designed to
allow the design of many font servers.
To our knowledge, this is the only royalty-free complete TrueType
engine available. Moreover, its quality fully matches these of
Windows or the Macintosh, a thing that cannot be said for most
other commercial engines available.
FreeType is a clean-room implementation that is not derived from
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 numerous ambiguities; its end result
is a portable, fast quality renderer!
The library itself takes about 55kByte of Intel code, complete
with a TrueType byte-code interpreter and a high-performance
scan-line converter.
You will find in this release:
- The C source code has been successfully compiled and run on
various platforms, including MS-DOS, OS/2, Amiga, Linux and
several other variants of Unix. It is written in ANSI C and
should be very easily ported to any platform.
- A high level API to be used by client applications and font
servers. This release is a "real beta", which means that the
API is functional and complete, but may contain bugs. We
release it to the public to help chase bugs, but we invite
you, unlike the four preceding 'alphas', to test and develop
your own code on this API.
- Support for the following features:
o Font smoothing, a.k.a gray-level rendering.
o Support for all character mappings.
o A full-featured TrueType byte-code interpreter.
o Composite glyphs.
o TrueType collections
o Multiple opened fonts and point sizes.
o Support for extensions.
o Kerning support.
Note also that:
- Though development of the library is mainly performed on OS/2
and Linux, the library does not contain system-specific code.
- The package contains some graphics drivers used by the test
programs for display purposes on MS-DOS, OS/2, Amiga, and
X11. These drivers are absolutely not mandatory for running the
FreeType engine. Some console-mode test programs like 'lint' or
'ftdump' don't use graphics at all.
- We welcome any kind of volunteers willing to help
BeOS, RiscOS, and other exotic things.. ).
For more information point your browser at:
-------------------------------------------
http://www.physiol.med.tu-muenchen.de/~robert/freetype.html
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