FreeType high-level python API
==============================

Freetype python provides bindings for the FreeType library. Only the high-level API is bound.

Documentation available at: http://freetype-py.readthedocs.org/en/latest/

Installation
============

To be able to use freetype python, you need the freetype library version 2
installed on your system.

Mac users
---------

Freetype should be already installed on your system. If not, either install it
using `homebrew <http://brew.sh>`_ or compile it and place the library binary
file in '/usr/local/lib'.

Linux users
-----------

Freetype should be already installed on your system. If not, either install
relevant package from your package manager or compile from sources and place
the library binary file in '/usr/local/lib'.

Window users
------------

You can try to install a window binaries available from the Freetype site or
you can compile it from sources. In such a case, make sure the resulting
library binaries is named 'Freetype.dll' (and not something like
Freetype245.dll) and make sure to place a copy in Windows/System32 directory.

Usage example
=============

.. code:: python

   import freetype
   face = freetype.Face("Vera.ttf")
   face.set_char_size( 48*64 )
   face.load_char('S')
   bitmap = face.glyph.bitmap
   print bitmap.buffer

Screenshots
===========

Screenshot below comes from the wordle.py example. No clever tricks here, just
brute force.

.. image:: doc/_static/wordle.png

Screenshots below comes from the glyph-vector.py and glyph-vectopr-2.py
examples showing how to access a glyph outline information and use it to draw
the glyph. Rendering (with Bézier curves) is done using matplotlib.

.. image:: doc/_static/S.png
.. image:: doc/_static/G.png


Screenshot below comes from the glyph-color.py showing how to draw and combine
a glyph outline with the regular glyph.

.. image:: doc/_static/outline.png

The screenshot below comes from the hello-world.py example showing how to draw
text in a bitmap (that has been zoomed in to show antialiasing).

.. image:: doc/_static/hello-world.png


The screenshot below comes from the agg-trick.py example showing an
implementation of ideas from the `Texts Rasterization Exposures
<http://agg.sourceforge.net/antigrain.com/research/font_rasterization/>`_ by
Maxim Shemarev.

.. image:: doc/_static/agg-trick.png


Contributors
============

* Titusz Pan (bug report)
* Ekkehard.Blanz (bug report)
* Jānis Lībeks (bug report)
* Frantisek Malina (typo)
* Tillmann Karras (bug report & fix)
* Matthew Sitton (bug report & fix)
* Tao Gong (bug report)