
FREETYPE 1
Servers Converters Bindings Libraries Other \| home page

Red comments indicate the current status of the projects if known.

FreeType 1 is used in a great number of products and projects. This page contains only a small list of selected projects (most of them open-source, though the library is also used in a great quantity of commercial products). Mail us if you want to see your project to your list.

Font Servers

FreeType/2

a free font server for OS/2. ©Michal Necasek

FreeType/2 is a free replacement for OS/2's TRUETYPE.DLL. It works perfectly on all 32-bit versions of OS/2, even good old 2.1. See here for more info.

A binary package, containing simple install/uninstall scripts, is available on our download page.

XFSFT

[2009-Dec-25] Dead. FreeType 2 is now part of the X11 server.

A TrueType-enabled font server for all X11 stations. ©Mark Leisher and Juliusz Chroboczek

XFSFT is a set of patches to the standard XFree source code distribution that allows its font server, named xfs, to use TrueType fonts, in addition to its other formats (Type 1, Speedo, PCF, etc..). Note that, as it is an independent process, the patched font server can be used on any platform, even those using a commercial X servers

See Juliusz Chroboczek's page for further info, screenshots, precompiled binaries, and the latest source code. Screenshots of Netscape using TrueType Fonts and a precompiled xfs binary for Linux Redhat 5.0 are available from Jörg Pommnitz's xfsft page.

You can also use xfstt, a TrueType-only font server developed independently from FreeType, which can be found at:
ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/X11/fonts/.
Look for a file named Xfstt-*.tar.gz. It works well and compiles fast, though seems to comply with the standard in its own way. Definitely worth the try.

X-TrueType

[2009-Dec-25] Dead. FreeType 2 is now part of the X11 server.

A different project with the same goal than XFSFT. It is however designed with Japanese and other ideographics, like Chinese and Korean scripts in mind (that XFSFT doesn't handle too well).

More information is available at the X-TrueType project page.

Font Converters

TTF2PFB

[2009-Dec-25] Dead. Use FontForge instead.

Converting TrueType fonts to the Postscript Type 1 format. ©Lee Chun-Yu and Werner Lemberg

This tool does not yet convert composite TrueType glyphs correctly (it is needed to decompose overlapping outlines into non-overlapping ones; such algorithms are still under investigation). Source code is available in the contrib/ttf2pfb directory of the FreeType archive.

Note that we also recommend using the ttf2pt1 tool to generate postscript fonts. It provides features that are not found in TTF2PFB, like automatic Type 1 hints generation.

TTF2PK

[2009-Dec-25] Unmaintained, more or less. If you need this, get the version from TeXLive instead which contains various bug fixes.

A simple conversion tool to bring TrueType quality to the TeX world. ©Frédéric Loyer and Werner Lemberg

Supports composite glyphs and hinting (unlike the current Ghostscript-based conversion tools). Source code is available in the contrib/ttf2pk directory of the FreeType archive.

TTF2BDF

[2009-Dec-25] Deprecated. Use otf2bdf instead.

Produce bitmapped fonts from TrueType files for your X11 applications. ©Mark Leisher

While the FreeType/X11 font server is still in the works, this tool can already be used to produce bitmap fonts in the Adobe BDF format to be used in legacy X applications.

Source code is available in the "contrib/ttf2bdf" directory of the FreeType archive.

Language Bindings

Python

Bindings to FreeType are available for Python programs through the PyFT library. © Robert Kern.

Perl

A binding to the Perl language is also available from the same people that brought us X-TrueType on this page.

TCL

TrueType font support for the TCL GD graphics package. ©John Ellson

Go to http://ftp.graphviz.org/pub/ for more details.

PHP

PHP is a server-side web scripting language that now has support for the FreeType library. They are using code from the gdttf package written by John Ellson to interface FreeType to PHP's already existing GD support.

PHP has two FreeType-related functions: ImageTTFText() and ImageTTFBBox().

Aptilis

Aptilis is a scripting language specifically designed to dynamically create dynamic web pages. Unlike other alternatives like PHP or Zope, it doesn't use server-side includes, which results in clearer syntax, and easier management. It includes a command to generate text images through FreeType, it is demonstrated here

http://www.glaine.net/aptilis/

Libraries

The GLTT library

A library that allows you to use TrueType fonts in any OpenGL application. ©Stéphane Rehel

The FreeType Project logo was generated with Gltt. Complete information and download can be found here.

ALLEGTTF

A TrueType font loader and fast antialiased text drawing routines for DJGPP and Allegro. ©Doug Eleveld

Supports hinting and smoothing. Source code is available here.

VFlib

VFlib is a font library written in C providing several functions to obtain bitmaps of characters (i.e., a rasterizer). VFlib hides the font format of font files and provides a unified API for all supported font formats. The homepage of VFlib is:

http://www.se.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/~kakugawa/VFlib/.

It uses FreeType 1 as its TrueType-rendering backend.

GD

GD is a library for fast image creation. It can use FreeType 1.x to generate text on images.

http://www.boutell.com/gd/.

ImageMagick

ImageMagick is a robust collection of tools and libraries to read, write, and manipulate an image in any of the more popular image formats

http://imagemagick.org.

SDL_ttf

The Simple DirectMedia Library is a cross-platform gaming library that handles graphics, sound, input and even network. SDL_ttf is a SDL library used to display text with TrueType fonts using FreeType 1.x.

http://www.libsdl.org/projects/SDL_ttf/.