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  <title>The design of FreeType 2</title>
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<h1 align=center>
  The design of FreeType&nbsp;2
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<h3 align=center>
  Copyright&nbsp;1998-2000 David Turner (<a
  href="mailto:david@freetype.org">david@freetype.org</a>)<br>
  Copyright&nbsp;2000 The FreeType Development Team (<a
  href="mailto:devel@freetype.org">devel@freetype.org</a>)
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    <h1>
      Introduction
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<p>This document provides details on the design and implementation of the
  FreeType&nbsp;2 library.  Its goal is to allow developers to better
  understand the way how FreeType&nbsp;2 is organized, in order to let them
  extend, customize, and debug it.</p>

<p>Before anything else, it is important to understand the
  <em>purpose</em> of this library, i.e., why it has been written:</p>

<ul>
    <li>
      <p>It allows client applications to <em>access font files easily</em>,
      wherever they could be stored, and as independently of the font format
      as possible.</p>
    </li>
    <li>
      <p>Easy <em>retrieval of global font data</em> most commonly found in
      normal font formats (i.e. global metrics, encoding/charmaps,
      etc.).</p>
    </li>
    <li>
      <p>It allows easy <em>retrieval of individual glyph data</em>
      (metrics, images, name, anything else).</p>
    </li>
    <li>
      <p><em>Access to font format-specific "features"</em> whenever
      possible (e.g. SFNT tables, Multiple Masters, OpenType Layout tables,
      etc.).</p>
    </li>
  </ul>

<p>Its design has also severely been influenced by the following
  requirements:</p>

<ul>
    <li>
      <p><em>High portability</em>.  The library must be able to run on any
      kind of environment.  This requirement introduces a few drastic
      choices that are part of FreeType&nbsp;2's low-level system
      interface.</p>
    </li>
    <li>
      <p><em>Extendability</em>.  New features should be added with the
      least modifications in the library's code base.  This requirement
      induces an extremely simple design where nearly all operations are
      provided by modules.</p>
    </li>
    <li>
      <p><em>Customization</b>.  It should be easy to build a version of the
      library that only contains the features needed by a specific project.
      This really is important when you need to integrate it in a font
      server for embedded graphics libraries.</p>
    </li>
    <li>
      <p><em>Compactness</em> and <em>efficiency</em>.  The primary target
      for this library are embedded systems with low cpu and memory
      resources.</p>
    </li>
  </ul>

<p>The rest of this document is divided in several sections.  First, a few
  chapters will present the library's basic design as well as the
  objects/data managed internally by FreeType&nbsp;2.</p>

<p>A later section is then dedicated to library customization, relating
  such topics as system-specific interfaces, how to write your own module
  and how to tailor library initialization & compilation to your needs.</p>

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