I'm excited to announce the immediate availability of FreeType 2 bindings on hackage.  These bindings are based off the 2.4.4 release of FreeType 2 and use the BSD licensing option for FreeType 2.  This package should be of interest to OpenGL users as it provides a way to get nice looking fonts into your OpenGL programs.

This binding is still in its infancy, hence version 0.0.1, but enough of the API is exposed that I was able to convert the example1.c program in the FreeType tutorial to Haskell.  Here are a few relevant links:

  * What is FreeType: http://www.freetype.org/freetype2/index.html
  * Example program and tutorial:
    * http://www.freetype.org/freetype2/docs/tutorial/step1.html
    * http://www.freetype.org/freetype2/docs/tutorial/example1.c
  * Haskell version of tutorial:
    * https://github.com/dagit/freetype2/blob/cabalization/Main.hs
  * Example program output (yes, their tutorial example really does draw the bitmap as a grid of text, scroll around to find the word "blah"), more interesting examples to come later:
    * http://hpaste.org/45239/aoeu

The current API level is "raw" and makes no attempts to present a good Haskell-like interface to the library.  My plan is to build a higher level interface on top once a sufficient portion of the API is available to Haskell.

You can find the source on github in the cabalization branch:
  * https://github.com/dagit/freetype2

Patches welcome!

Thanks,
Jason