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<h1><a href="index.html">FreeType</a> History</h1>
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<h3>FreeType 1</h3>
<p>The main author of FreeType was David Turner, who created
the library in 1996 to render TrueType fonts, including an
interpreter for handling TrueType bytecode. It was
originally written in
the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal_%28programming_language%29">Pascal</a>
programming language. In 1997, Robert Wilhelm ported it
to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_%28programming_language%29">C</a>,
and Werner Lemberg joined the team. Originally, the C and
Pascal versions were developed in parallel, however,
development of the Pascal version stopped in 2000.</p>
<p>Using FreeType 1, as this original version is called
today, some programs were written which then had some
impact, for example <a href="ft_os2/index.html">FreeType/2</a>,
a better TrueType font driver for
the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2">OS/2</a>
operating system, or ttf2pk, a converter from TrueType
fonts
to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX">TeX</a>'s PK
bitmap format (this program, while updated to use
FreeType 2,
is <a href="https://www.tug.org/svn/texlive/trunk/Build/source/texk/ttf2pk2/">still
part of TeXLive</a>).</p>
<p>Robert Wilhelm stopped working on FreeType in 2000.</p>
<p>For historical reasons you can find here links to the
documentation of FreeType 1. Note that those pages are
no longer maintained.</p>
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<p><a href="freetype1/index.html">Overview</a><br>
<a href="freetype1/index.html#features">Features</a><br>
<a href="freetype1/index.html#requirements">Requirements</a><br>
<a href="freetype1/screenshots.html">Screenshots</a><br>
<a href="freetype1/documentation.html">Documentation</a><br>
<a href="patents.html">Patent issues</a><br>
<a href="opentype/index.html">OpenType support</a><br>
<a href="freetype1/projects.html">Related
projects</a></p>
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<h3>FreeType 2</h3>
<p>After several beta releases, version 2.0 of FreeType was
released in 2000, providing a complete rewrite to make it
modular. To distinguish it from FreeType 1, it was
then called FreeType 2 (which is no longer necessary
today). Most important new features were the support of
multiple font formats, in particular PostScript fonts
(together with hinting engine), a much improved rendering
backend for gray-level images, and a module for caching
glyphs images and glyph metrics. Later versions added
support for even more font formats and LCD rendering
modes.</p>
<p>In the year 1999 we were informed by Apple Inc. that
FreeType was infringing patents related to TrueType
hinting (see <a href="patents.html">here</a> for more).
As a consequence, we disabled the bytecode interpreter
completely by default. Later on we were able to refine
this radical cut by disabling only the patented
instructions, handling more than 95% of the other
instructions just fine and circumventing problems with the
remaining 5% to a certain extent. Another consequence was
the invention of the auto-hinter which needs no hints at
all (you can
find <a href="https://www.tug.org/TUGboat/tb24-3/lemberg.pdf">here</a>
an early scholarly paper). Today, the TrueType patents
have expired.</p>
<p>Around 2004 it was decided to restrict FreeType to a
single target: Creating (rasterized) glyph images.
Attempts to handle OpenType layout features and text
shaping were abandoned since this could be handled much
better with a separate library on top of FreeType
(cf. <a href="http://www.icu-project.org/">ICU</a> or
<a href="http://harfbuzz.org">Harfbuzz</a>).
<p>In 2009, the source code repository has been migrated
from <a href="https://www.nongnu.org/cvs/">CVS</a>
to <a href="https://git-scm.com/">git</a>, and David Turner
stopped active development on FreeType. Since then the
only maintainer is Werner Lemberg, with the help of others
who contribute fixes and improvements.</p>
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<p>Last update: 18-Jan-2019</p>
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