freetype2

Wrapper around FreeType 2 library. Relevant exerpts from the FreeType 2 website: What is FreeType 2? FreeType 2 is a software font engine that is designed to be small, efficient, highly customizable, and portable while capable of producing high-quality output (glyph images). It can be used in graphics libraries, display servers, font conversion tools, text image generation tools, and many other products as well. The following is a non-exhaustive list of features provided by FreeType 2. FreeType 2 provides a simple and easy-to-use API to access font content in a uniform way, independently of the file format. Additionally, some format-specific APIs can be used to access special data in the font file. Unlike most comparable libraries, FreeType 2 supports scalable font formats like TrueType or Type 1 natively and can return the outline data (and control instructions/hints) to client applications. By default, FreeType 2 supports the following font formats. TrueType fonts (and collections) Type 1 fonts CID-keyed Type 1 fonts CFF fonts OpenType fonts (both TrueType and CFF variants) SFNT-based bitmap fonts X11 PCF fonts Windows FNT fonts BDF fonts (including anti-aliased ones) PFR fonts Type 42 fonts (limited support) From a given glyph outline, FreeType 2 is capable of producing a high-quality monochrome bitmap, or anti-aliased pixmap, using 256 levels of gray. This is much better than the 5 levels used by Windows 9x/98/NT/2000 or FreeType 1. FreeType 2 supports all the character mappings defined by the TrueType and OpenType specification. It is also capable of automatically synthetizing a Unicode charmap from Type 1 fonts, which puts an end to the painful 'encoding translation' headache common with this format (of course, original encodings are also available in the case where you need them). The FreeType 2 core API provides simple functions to access advanced information like glyph names or kerning data. FreeType 2 provides information that is often not available from other similar font engines, like kerning distances, glyph names, vertical metrics, etc. FreeType 2 provides its own caching subsystem since release 2.0.1. It can be used to cache either face instances or glyph images efficiently.