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 This document provides details on the design and implementation of the
  FreeType 2 library.  Its goal is to allow developers to better
  understand the way how FreeType 2 is organized, in order to let them
  extend, customize, and debug it. Before anything else, it is important to understand the
  purpose of this library, i.e., why it has been written: 
    
      It allows client applications to access font files easily,
      wherever they could be stored, and as independently of the font format
      as possible.
      Easy retrieval of global font data most commonly found in
      normal font formats (i.e. global metrics, encoding/charmaps,
      etc.).
      It allows easy retrieval of individual glyph data
      (metrics, images, name, anything else).
      Access to font format-specific "features" whenever
      possible (e.g. SFNT tables, Multiple Masters, OpenType Layout tables,
      etc.). Its design has also severely been influenced by the following
  requirements: 
    
      High portability.  The library must be able to run on any
      kind of environment.  This requirement introduces a few drastic
      choices that are part of FreeType 2's low-level system
      interface.
      Extendability.  New features should be added with the
      least modifications in the library's code base.  This requirement
      induces an extremely simple design where nearly all operations are
      provided by modules.
      Customization.  It should be easy to build a version of the
      library that only contains the features needed by a specific project.
      This really is important when you need to integrate it in a font
      server for embedded graphics libraries.
      Compactness and efficiency.  The primary target
      for this library are embedded systems with low cpu and memory
      resources. The rest of this document is divided in several sections.  First, a few
  chapters will present the library's basic design as well as the
  objects/data managed internally by FreeType 2. A later section is then dedicated to library customization, relating
  such topics as system-specific interfaces, how to write your own module
  and how to tailor library initialization & compilation to your needs. 
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