Systems and methods used for bilinear texture filtering may also be used to perform font filtering. Font data stored as a texture is read from memory in blocks that are coarsely aligned. Font alignment units may be used to provide a finely aligned region of the font data within a font filter footprint. The finely aligned region is then filtered using bilinear filtering to produce font coverage information representing a grayscale value for a pixel. Using existing bilinear filtering engines in conjunction with font alignment and sample units reduces the need for having a specific engine to perform each of the font filtering operations, possibly saving die area in a graphics system.