libschrift

libschrift is a lightweight TrueType font rendering library.

It can be seen as a much smaller, but more limited alternative to FreeType2.

Specifically, libschrift aims to:

• Be as simple and easy-to-use as possible. See: https://www.suckless.org/philosophy/
• Make correct (as in artifact-free, Unicode-aware etc.) font rendering easy to achieve.
• Be reasonably secure, which especially means to not crash, leak memory / resources or expose major security vulnerabilities on corrupted / malicious / random inputs.

Limitations

• Unicode is the only supported text encoding.
• Support for most TrueType (.ttf) and certain OpenType (.otf) fonts. No bitmap or PostScript fonts.
• No hinting. Especially no auto-hinting like FreeType2.

Documentation

For documentation on how to use libschrift in your own programs, refer to the schrift(3) man page, the source code of the bundled demo, as well as the header file schrift.h.

You can also view the man page in your browser at http://tomolt.github.io/libschrift/

Progress

In terms of security and performance, libschrift is already pretty solid. However, it is still missing some important features, like right-to-left text support.

Visual Quality

A screenshot of the demo program:

Contributing

Bug Reports, Suggestions, Questions, Criticism, Pull Requests and Patches are all welcome!

If you intend to contribute sizeable features or API changes, you might save yourself some time by posting an Issue for them on Github first. This way, if there happens to be any reason why I couldn't merge your contribution, we can find and rectify it right away! 😃

You can also buy me (Thomas Oltmann) a coffee, if you'd like: