fcft ☆

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Description:
Simple library for font loading and glyph rasterization

Type: Formula | Latest Version: 3.3.2@0 | Tracked Since: Dec 17, 2025

Links: Homepage | formulae.brew.sh

Category: System utilities

Tags: font rendering wayland graphics c-library

Install: brew install fcft

About:
fcft is a lightweight font loading and glyph rasterization library designed for Wayland compositors and terminal emulators. It leverages Fontconfig for font discovery and uses FreeType and Harfbuzz for rendering, providing a simple C API to obtain glyph bitmaps. Its primary value is offering a minimal dependency footprint while handling complex font features like variable fonts and color emojis.

Key Features:

Supports TrueType, OpenType, and Color Emoji fonts
Handles complex text shaping via Harfbuzz
Minimal dependencies and low memory footprint
Simple C API for easy integration

Use Cases:

Rendering text in Wayland compositors like Sway
Font handling in lightweight terminal emulators
Embedding font support in custom UI toolkits

Alternatives:

Pango – Pango is a more comprehensive layout engine but has significantly larger dependencies.
libtextstyle – libtextstyle focuses on styled terminal output but lacks advanced font rendering features.

License: MIT

Dependencies: fontconfig, freetype, harfbuzz, pixman, utf8proc

Bottles available for: arm64_linux, x86_64_linux

Version History

Detected	Version	Rev	Change	Commit
Jan 2, 2025 1:55pm		0	VERSION_BUMP	9c3a0501
Oct 28, 2024 11:27am		0	NEW	8637e0f7