Font Tools

Fontconfig – library for configuring and customizing font access

Fontconfig is a library designed to provide system-wide font configuration, customization and application access. It contains two essential modules, the configuration module which builds an internal configuration from XML files and the matching module which accepts font patterns and returns the nearest matching font.

Note, Fontconfig doesn’t render the fonts themselves.

This is free and open source software.

Features include:

  • Discover new fonts when installed automatically, removing a common source of configuration problems.
  • Perform font name substitution, so that appropriate alternative fonts can be selected if fonts are missing.
  • Identify the set of fonts required to completely cover a set of languages.
  • GUI configuration tools built as it uses an XML-based configuration file (though with autodiscovery, we believe this need is minimized).
  • Efficiently and quickly find the fonts you need among the set of fonts you have installed, even if you have installed thousands of fonts, while minimzing memory usage.
  • Use together with the X Render Extension and FreeType to implement high quality, anti-aliased and subpixel rendered text on a display.

Website: www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/fontconfig
Support: GitLab Code Repository
Developer: Keith Packard, Patrick Lam
License: MIT License

Fontconfig is written in C. Learn C with our recommended free books and free tutorials.

Return to Font Rendering


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