VFlib — a General Font Library that Supports Multiple Font Formats

VFlib is a font library written in C providing several functions to obtain bitmaps of characters (i.e., a rasterizer). VFlib hides the font format of font les and provides a uni ed API for all supported font formats. Thus, programmers of application software need not worry about font le formats. Instead, any software using VFlib can support various font le formats immediately. In addition to this, when a new font format is supported by VFlib, application software need not be modi ed to use such new fonts. VFlib has been developed for not only Latin fonts but also Asian scripts such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Since it is designed as a general font module, it can be used in DVI drivers for T E X and L A T E X. In this paper, we explain the API of VFlib, a font database le called v ibcap, and the internal structure of VFlib.