FreeType WASM

Recently, I've been very interested in WebAssembly (WASM) and bringing native apps and libraries to the web, thus pushing the limits of what's possible on the web today.

This project in particular is about FreeType, a popular library for rendering fonts that supports many different font formats. It's used in a lot of applications such as PDF viewers, web browsers, word processors, games, and design tools.

Making FreeType available as a WASM module makes it possible to run this logic in the user's browser, instead of requiring installation of a native application or a server-side component. This is especially useful for web applications that need to render text in a custom way, such as design tools or games.

The source code for FreeType is written in C, so I used Emscripten to compile it to WASM. This FreeType WASM port provides the same features and functionality as the original C library.

Using the WASM-compiled FreeType, I built an online tool for parsing font files which lets you visually inspect glyphs with character mappings.

See also

• Font Parser - An online tool for parsing font files.
• WebLogo in the browser - Bringing WebLogo to the browser + demo of a pure client side sequence logo maker.
• BLAST WASM - Compiling the BLAST sequence search/alignment tool to WASM.
• Phonetic Analyzer - A web-based phonetic analyzer built on top of Praat.
• DESeq2 in the browser - Running DESeq2 in the browser.
• Erlang/OTP WASM (Erlang in the browser) - Execute Erlang code in the browser.
• Local Font Browser - Explore locally installed fonts.
• GF Viewer - Open "generic font" (.gf) files online.
• WASM ports - A list of software compiled to/ported to WebAssembly/JavaScript.
• The nine best fonts of all time - The list of my top nine favorite fonts.
• RDKit WASM - Running RDKit in the browser with WebAssembly.
• Font Converter - Convert fonts between different formats.
• Aegyptus's Easter eggs - Fun hieroglyphic Easter eggs in the Aegyptus font.
• Font Viewer - An online font viewer.
• Timeless fonts I grew up with - A nostalgic journey into the fonts that shaped my perspective growing up and continue to be my source of inspiration.