The majority of fonts used in modern software are encoded in vector format for proper scaling support. There are multiple standards for vector fonts, for example Metafont from Professor Donald E. Knuth, Type1 from Adobe, TrueType from Apple and Microsoft, and OpenType from Adobe and Microsoft.
Rasterization of vector fonts is a remarkably complex task and most desktop software (such as web browsers or text processors) use third-party libraries to work with fonts.
Sun Microsystems licensed a third-party closed source font library for use in Sun Java implementation. The sources for this library could not be released to the public along with the initial release of OpenJDK. The Font Scaler Replacement Project was launched in the early days of OpenJDK to adopt the open source font library instead.
FreeType is a free and open source (under permissive license) font rasterization library. It is widely used in open source desktop software....