FreeType is a freely available software library to render fonts.

It is written in C, designed to be small, efficient, highly customizable, and portable while capable of producing high-quality output (glyph images) of most vector and bitmap font formats.

Some products that use FreeType for rendering fonts on screen or on paper, either exclusively or partially:

• GNU/Linux and other free Unix operating system derivates like FreeBSD or NetBSD;
• Platforms for smart devices, including Android, Tizen, and Roku;
• iOS, Apple's mobile operating system for iPhones and iPads;
• ChromeOS, Google's operating system for laptop computers;
• ReactOS, a free open source operating system based on the best design principles found in the Windows NT architecture;
• Ghostscript, a PostScript interpreter used in many printers;
• Web browser engines such as Chromium, WebKit, Gecko, and Goanna.

Counting the above products only, you get more than a billion devices that contain FreeType.

News & Updates

FreeType 2.15.0

This release comes with a bunch of new features; the most important ones are

• support for the ISO Open Font Format, Edition 5 (released in July 2026), allowing for much more compact CJK Variation fonts and fonts with more than 65536 glyphs;

• a driver for Apple's new HVF format, currently for Apple platforms (macOS, iOS, etc.) only; and

• ClearType rendering improvements, fixing some glitches in well-known fonts such as 'Segoe UI' or 'Calibri'. The image below shows two characters of 'Comic Sans' at 18ppem without and with the new code.

  

More details on other changes and bug fixes can be found in the release notes.

FreeType 2.14.3

This is a maintenance release, fixing potential security issues. All users should upgrade.

The release notes can be found here.

FreeType 2.14.2

This is mostly a maintenance release; because it fixes a bunch of potential security issues it is recommended that all users upgrade to this version.

The most noteworthy improvement is a 40% speed-up of ClearType-like rendering at sizes above 32ppem. The remaining changes can be found in the release notes.

FreeType 2.14.1

This is an emergency release that fixes a couple of severe bugs introduced in version 2.14.0 and discovered right after the release; see issues #1349, #1353, #1354, #1355, and #1356.

FreeType 2.14.0

Don't use this release! Use release 2.14.1 instead.

This release brings two important new features.

• The HarfBuzz library (on which FreeType usually depends) can now be loaded dynamically. This avoids the circular dependency between HarfBuzz and FreeType, which caused a lot of grievance for people whose job was to distribute FreeType and HarfBuzz as packages.

• The diacritic handling of the auto-hinter at small sizes got improved. Diacritics are now better separated vertically, the tilde shape is retained, and the ogonek accent (and similar accents) no longer distorts the base glyph. The image shows arial.ttf in light auto-hinting mode at 17ppem, without and with the new code.

  

In case you are using the TT_CONFIG_OPTION_GPOS_KERNING option, you should update since the old code didn't properly validate input files, which could lead to crashes with malformed font files.

Other news and changes can be found in the release notes.

FreeType 2.13.3

The B/W rasterizer has become much faster; besides that, it is a maintenance release.

As usual, a list of the more noteworthy changes can be found in the release notes.

FreeType 2.13.2

This is a maintenance release with only minor changes.

Details can be found in the release notes.

FreeType 2.13.1

This is a maintenance release with only minor changes, for example, a new load flag FT_LOAD_NO_SVG to ignore glyphs in an SVG SFNT table, or a new function FT_Get_Default_Named_Instance to get the index of the default named instance of an OpenType Variation Font.

Please check release notes for more details.

FreeType 2.13.0

This new release brings you a completely updated and enhanced ftinspect demo program, which now combines the functionality of almost all other graphical FreeType demo programs into a single application based on the Qt framework.

Another two noteworthy features are related to OpenType fonts: The ‘COLR’ v1 API is now considered as stable, and the ‘avar’ v2 extension is supported.

Other news and changes can be found in the release notes.

FreeType 2.12.1

This is a maintenance release. All users should upgrade. A list of the most important changes and fixes can be found here.

FreeType 2.12.0

The main new feature of this release is support for OpenType fonts with an ‘SVG’ table, using an external SVG rendering library. Other changes, fixes, and improvements are documented here.

FreeType 2.11.1

This is a maintenance release with no significant changes. For more details on the various fixes and changes please see here.

FreeType 2.11.0

Our new release brings an additional rendering module to create Signed Distance Fields (SDF) for glyphs; it also introduces an experimental interface to access ‘COLR’ v1 fonts.

As usual, there are many more fixes and features; please see here for more.

FreeType moved to freedesktop.org

We are now using the infrastructure of the gitlab instance of freedesktop.org. All bug issues have been imported (kudos to Anurag Thakur for doing this tedious job!), together with the git repositories, which have been renamed to freetype and freetype-demos (this is, we are dropping the ‘2’ in the repository names).

The git repositories at Savannah will stay as mirrors.

FreeType 2.10.4

This is an emergency release, fixing a severe vulnerability in embedded PNG bitmap handling (see here for more).

All users should update immediately.

FreeType 2.10.3

This is a maintenance release, having better support for TrueType glyphs with overlapping contours. See the list of changes for more details.

A warning for distribution maintainers: Version 2.10.3 and later may break the build of ghostscript, due to ghostscript's use of a withdrawn macro that wasn't intended for external usage. A fix is available here.

FreeType 2.10.2

Besides various maintenance fixes, this release comes with support of WOFF 2 fonts. More details are listed in the list of changes.

FreeType 2.10.1

A new maintenance release, fixing bytecode hinting of OpenType variation fonts and cmap processing of PCF fonts, among other things. Check the list of changes for more fixes.

FreeType 2.10.0

This release brings one notable feature, namely support for color-layered outline glyphs (for example, scalable emoji glyphs). Additionally, the API reference has been completely overhauled and modernized, as already announced.

As usual, many minor fixes and corrections have been applied also; a detailed list is given here.

Links

The links collected in this section are useful if you want to put FreeType into a larger frame of understanding.

Reference Sites

Detailed information on the font formats supported by FreeType can be found in the file formats.txt, which is part of the FreeType source code bundle.

Font Tools

Font Shaping and Layout Engines

These libraries work on top of font rendering libraries like FreeType to provide sophisticated text (string) layout, being able to handle OpenType features in particular. All of them use Unicode for font and text encoding.

Other Font-related Libraries

This page is maintained by Werner Lemberg. The FreeType logo has been designed by Manuel Colom.