pastry

pastry is a tiny truetype font renderer written in pure c99. it’s made to be simple, lightweight, and memory-friendly, which is perfect for embedded systems, games, or apps where big engines like freetype feel overkill.

features

• single-file library
• solid truetype support
• memory efficient
• no external dependencies
• cross platform
• handles compound glyphs
• supports unicode bmp (0x0000–0xffff)
• hinting support*
• ligature support*
• affine transforms (scaling, translation, limited rotation)

limitations

• no runtime truetype bytecode hinting. pastry just renders the outlines directly from the font. most modern fonts are pre-hinted anyway, so you're probably fine
• no text layout or substitution (like auto-turning f + i into fi), but if your system provides the pre-composed ligature glyph, pastry will render it perfectly
• no opentype features (like contextual alternates, glyph substitution, or positioning)
• no font collection handling. pastry just loads the full font file — you can’t pick individual weights or styles from a collection
• no support for color glyphs (colr/cpal), variable fonts, or characters outside the bmp (so, no emoji)
• only supports cmap tables 4, 6, 12, and 13, plus simple/compound glyf outlines
• only has its own fixed grayscale anti-aliasing method

usage

look at demo.c for a usage example — the api is designed to be pretty simple, tbh.