14 DAY TRIAL // Google has released sfntly, a font programing library which promises lightning fast speed in processing fonts, for any application or website that may need to.
The library has been open sourced, it is used internally by Google already, and is now available for everyone to use. sfntly is available as a Java and C++ library, making it useful for a broader variety of applications, from Windows software, to server-side web apps.
"Earlier this month we released the sfntly font programming library as open source. Created by the Google Internationalization Engineering team, the sfntly Java and C++ library makes it easy for programmers to build high performance font manipulation applications and services," Stuart Gill, sfntly Architect at Google, wrote.
"sfntly is really, really fast: Raph Levien, Google Web Fonts Engineer, says, 'Using sfntly we can subset a large font in a millisecond. It’s faster than gzip'ing the result'," he boasts.
Google uses the library for its own purposes, it developed it to be used internally first and foremost. For example, the Google Web Fonts team uses the Java version to create font subsets on the fly for websites that require them.
At the same time, the Google Chrome team uses the C++ version for the relatively newly introduced feature, PDF printing, again, to subset fonts.
Google has been working on the library for about a year and has now finally reached a point where it's confident enough to release it to the public, as open source.
Google boasts that the current version supports most TrueType and OpenType fonts and more are added. Fonts that use the sfnt format are mostly supported.
More features are planned for future relases: "expanding support for the rest of the OpenType spec and other sfnt-container font formats, other serialization forms, better higher level abstractions, and more."