The FreeType engine (
freetype-1.1: description + notes
libttf.so) 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.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 library for development of other freeware packages or their own software applications will need to be familiar with a few peculiarities due to the way that this library is packaged and installed. The reasons for this installation strategy are described further in the fw_common product release notes.
The header files and libraries in this package are installed into /usr/freeware. This means that when building software using this distribution of libttf you should be sure to do the following:
This flag will cause your compilations to correctly find the library's header files at compile time.
- Include the following flag on your compile lines:
- -I/usr/freeware/include
Include the following flag on your link lines:
-L/usr/freeware/lib (if using o32 ABI) -L/usr/freeware/lib32 (if using n32 ABI) -L/usr/freeware/lib64 (if using 64 ABI) This flag will cause the linker to correctly find the library's archive or shared object files at link time.
Additionally, include the following flag on your link lines:
-rpath /usr/freeware/lib (if using o32 ABI) -rpath /usr/freeware/lib32 (if using n32 ABI) -rpath /usr/freeware/lib64 (if using 64 ABI) This flag will allow the binary to locate the shared object library files when the application is run. This is required since the shared objects are stored in these /usr/freeware subdirectories which are not searched by the run-time linker by default.
Finally, if you are building an installable package for inst (contributing to freeware, for example) be sure to make your package depend upon this package. Add the following line to your spec file: prereq ( fw_freetype.sw.eoe 1230000000 1239999900 ) Following these guidelines will allow your application to safely and easily use the software in this package.
To auto-install this package, go back and click on the respective install icon.