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I would like to know if the font libraries for PDF or HTML text rendering are binary applications that the main application calls. For example, to compile an open-source PDF rendering library you need to compile also freetype library. Is this library a collection of binary programs which draw the fonts by the tecnology they consider convenient?

yms
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P5music
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  • Given the conversion below, this is likely to overlap, or be a dup of, [this question](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10607029/mupdf-freetype-whose-fault-when-a-font-is-replaced-with-a-bad-one). – halfer May 15 '12 at 19:14
  • @halfer no, I accepted the answer saying they are not executable applications. – P5music May 15 '12 at 19:19

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Font libraries are not executable applications, they are just a bunch of data. Basically the font file defines the appearance of each glyph in terms of lines and curves (it is a little more complicated but this is the idea). Freetype is an open source executable library that is capable of parsing the font files and then render text on a graphics surface using the parsed font data.

iPDFdev
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  • Thx. So when I have poor results, for example, with poppler or mupdf libraries in Linux, is it the fonts', freetype's or poppler/mupdf's fault? – P5music May 15 '12 at 15:18
  • @yms I mean poor result in displaying a pdf page to an image, not authoring a pdf. Font are displayed badly even at high dpi. I made a QT4 test application that uses poppler on Linux, but I used also mupdf on windows and it's the same bad quality, whatever is the antialiasing parameter (mupdf). The standard pdf viewers have a good quality instead and they are based on those libraries. How is it possible? Font's, freetype's or library's fault? – P5music May 15 '12 at 18:13
  • @yms I am not authoring pdf's. I use one O'Reilly pdf book for tests and tested also other pdf's. I feel it is strange that the font you say is picked up as a replacement for the missing one is blurred or crippled. I would expect it has just a different appearance. The same book is displayed very well with the default viewer. – P5music May 15 '12 at 18:27
  • @yms the linux viewer too. Above all it does not yield a blurred font. – P5music May 15 '12 at 18:39
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    It is hard to tell whose fault it is. If you can post somewhere the test pdf file you used and the rendered page image, I can take a look at them and tell you more. – iPDFdev May 15 '12 at 18:47
  • now in another question http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10607029/mupdf-freetype-whose-fault-when-a-font-is-replaced-with-a-bad-one – P5music May 15 '12 at 19:26