fountainhead/README.md

# TrueType font parser

Fountainhead is a TrueType and OpenType font parser. Its main
purpose is to extract information from the fonts to help to
embed these fonts into PDF documents. It also supports dumping
font information to the screen.

There is also an executable to dump fonts.

## Installation

Add the library as dependency to your project.
Alternatively build an executable with:

```sh
cabal build
```

The binary can be run with:

```sh
cabal run fountainhead -- myfont.ttf
```

or installed locally and executed just as:

```sh
fountainhead myfont.ttf
```

This command will output the contents of the font in a format similar to
ttfdump from TeXLive.

See

```sh
fountainhead --help
```

for help.

## Usage

TrueType and OpenType fonts consist of a sequence of tables and various
informations about the font are encoded in these tables. There are both
required and optional tables. The first table is a font directory and it
describes the overall structure of the font, what tables it contains and at what
offset other tables can be found.

This library doesn't parse the whole font at once. The font directory has to be
parsed first and can be used then to parse further tables as needed.