FREETYPE DOWNLOADS

Stable Releases

Stable releases of the FreeType 2 packages, including source code, documentation, demo programs, and support tools can be downloaded directly from

Both sites have mirrors worldwide.

Windows binaries of FreeType 2 can also be downloaded directly from this download page (version 2.3.5) of the GnuWin32 project, or from GTK's download page (version 2.4.2).

The latest Freetype 1 release, today mainly of historical interest only, can be downloaded here. Other projects related to FreeType 1 are only available as CVS modules; see the developer page for more details.

Development versions

Using Savannah's cgit interface you can download snapshots created on the fly for any commit entry.

Downloading and compiling a development snapshot is one of the first things to do when you encounter something that looks like a bug in FreeType. Note that we do not guarantee that all development snapshots work on a given day, though this should be the normal case.

Support Tools and Binaries

GNU Make for Win32

GNU Make is required to use the FreeType 2 build system from a command line prompt.

Note that the binary comes from the excellent MinGW distribution, which we highly recommend over Cygwin, if you don't need POSIX-compliance, in terms of ease of use and performance.

After installation you should check that it is correctly invoked by typing:

  make -v

The first lines should read:

  GNU Make 3.81
  Copyright (C) 2006  Free Software Foundation, Inc.
  This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.
  There is NO warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A
  PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

Of course it is possible that you have a newer version which should work fine too.

FreeType Jam for Win32 and Linux (libc6)

Since release 2.0.2, FreeType 2 and its demo programs can be compiled with an alternative build tool called ‘jam’. Jam is a small, portable, and open-source replacement for ‘make’ that is a lot easier to use, and which transparently supports multiple platforms and compilers.

Binaries are available from the download page on SourceForge.

This page gives more information regarding Jam and FreeType.

Due to lack of resources, there is no Jam support currently for FreeType. Volunteers are highly welcomed.

FreeType/2

This is a free replacement for OS/2's TRUETYPE.DLL, providing better TrueType support than the original library.

It comes with simple ‘install’ and ‘uninstall’ scripts. Source code is available in the contrib/ftos2 directory of the FreeType 1 source archive (see above).

These files are only available from the CVS.