The FreeType engine 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.