The SFNT format is a table-based font storage format originally defined by Apple for the Macintosh computer system and later extended by Microsoft and Adobe, renamed OpenType, for the inclusion of advanced typographic features and support for CFF PostScript data.
This library aims to implement a parsing mechanism for SFNT data. The uses of this
are similar to the popular FreeType library used by many devices to display
scalable fonts. Java itself, under the hood, uses FreeType for some of it's
font technology. The issue with using Java's built-in font parser is the
reliance on Java2D (and primarily the device-dependent Graphics implementation)
Because rendering characteristics are so variable, and the facilities provided by Java are poorly equipped for this purpose, the actual implementation of a rasterizer has been left up to the client's discretion. That is to say that this library primarily concerns itself with the extraction and interpretation of font data, not with the actual display of it. Though the outline data is quite complex in nature, the format in which it is stored after parsing should not be difficult to understand, and thus it should be quite easy for a person knowlegable in computer graphics technology to render these glyphs without much effort on their part. It is the intention of this library to be unassuming about the goals of an individual client and therefore flexible in its applications.