freetype and freetype-doc 2.15.0

[Bruce Dubbs]

New minor version.

[Joe Locash]

CHANGES BETWEEN 2.14.3 and 2.15.0 (2026-Oct-12)

  I. IMPORTANT CHANGES

  - Support for the ISO Open Font  Format, Edition 5 (released in July
    2026) has been contributed by  Behdad Esfahbod, using various LLMs
    for deriving  basic code from HarfBuzz  and other implementations,
    followed by manual fine-tuning, mainly for greater speed.

    . The  new  'VARC' table  allows  a  file  size reduction  of  CJK
      Variation fonts by up to 90%.

    . OpenType fonts with  more than 65536 glyphs can  now be handled.
      The  new tables  related to  this feature  are all  written with
      uppercase  letters:  'MAXP',  'GLYF',  'LOCA',  'HHEA',  'VHEA',
      'HMTX', 'VMTX', 'GVAR', 'DMAP'.

    . The new 'GLYF' table also supports outlines with mixed cubic and
      conic segments.

  - The anti-aliased rasterizer now uses dynamic heap memory for large
    glyphs,  which  significantly improves  its performance  at  sizes
    above 40 ppem.

  - An  experimental  HVF  driver   has  been  contributed  by  Apple,
    currently available on macOS only.

  - The  TrueType   version  40  interpreter  got   several  ClearType
    rendering  improvements.   It  now   better  honors  'gasp'  table
    requests  for  symmetric  grid  fitting and  smoothing,  and  more
    closely  emulates  native   ClearType  horizontal  hinting.   This
    includes improved handling of rounded point instructions, `ROUND`,
    CVT cut-in, minimum distance, and composite glyph positioning.

    These changes improve  the rendering of fonts such  as 'Segoe UI',
    'Calibri', 'Corbel', 'Constantia', 'Malgun Gothic', 'SimSun',  and
    'Comic Sans MS'.


  II. IMPORTANT BUG FIXES

  - Continued efforts to scrutinize FreeType with AI tools resulted in
    more bugs  being fixed, some with  potential security implications
    (e.g., CVE-2026-95512).


  III. MISCELLANEOUS

  - The PFR driver returned wrong kerning values in some cases.

  - A port to the Plan 9 operating system is now available.

Fixed at eace5a122c. Leaving open for SA.

[Bruce Dubbs]

Advisory sa-13.1-066 has been issued.