RE: [ft-devel] Possible solution for TrueType patent problems...
Two of the three patents have already expired, which may be helpful. Graham Asher ___ Freetype-devel mailing list Freetype-devel@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/freetype-devel
Re: [ft-devel] Possible solution for TrueType patent problems...
The idea: From size 15 ALL fonts are drawn in a really satisfactory manner as antialiasing has to and can be used at those sizes. The problem is only with smaller sizes - glyphs are not clear enough or wobbly. Let´s put together TrueType fonts and bitmap fonts (of varying glyph widths). Let´s hint ourselves. WE do not need Apple´s algorithms. We have our eyes. WE know when it´s good and when it´s not. I´m talking about a maximum of 2000 hours for a reasonable number of fonts. On the shoulders of a few people this time can easily be provided by the OS community. You are greatly underestimating the time involved in developing good fonts. Just ask, say, the creator of the excellent Gentium family how many hours he has invested. Additionally, your point of view is very eurocentric IMHO -- fonts covering the big CJK character sets need *much* more time. This idea then has to be integrated into FreeType. If there´s an additional bitmap file existing, FreeType ignores any hinting and antialiasing for the special file (if constraints are as so, of cause) and takes the data out of the bitmap file. This is transparent to all applications and solves the problem. First of all, only a *small fraction* of instructions is affected by the Apple patents. Secondly, FreeType can circumvent the patents, with quite satisfactory results. With other words, switching off the bytecode interpreter completely is silly. Meanwhile, FreeType's autohinter produces excellent results for many fonts, regardless of hints. Instead of reinventing the wheel (this is, creating a bunch of bitmap fonts which still won't cover all cases), it's much better to invest free time in improving the autohinter, for example, by testing fonts for artifacts so that the hinting algorithm can be fine-tuned further. BTW, there is a much simpler solution than yours which I've suggested a few years ago (without any enthusiastic reaction): Use the patented bytecode interpreter to render all glyphs of a font, then do the same with the unpatented bytecode interpreter. Get the difference of the images for a great number of font sizes and store them in a compressed format. Such differences are probably just a few pixels per glyph (if at all), yielding a very compact representation. Additionally, this process can be automated. Imagine: I just wanted to change sides to Linux myself and wanted to convince my customers to do so, too - I have no chance to do so: Linux is ugly since years and it doesn´t manage to overcome it because of it´s ugly fonts. And NO: My customers won´t buy licences from Apple and most OS friends won´t do either... You are beating the wrong dog: It's not FreeType but the structures one top of it which give bad rendering results. Werner ___ Freetype-devel mailing list Freetype-devel@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/freetype-devel
RE: [ft-devel] Possible solution for TrueType patent problems...
Two of the three patents have already expired, which may be helpful. that's not true, because law is a bit subtle here. the patent expiration rules are now the following: - if the patent was filed after 1995-06-7, its expiration term is 20 years after the filing date. - if the was filed before 1995-06-07 and after 1978-06-08, then the term is 17 years from the issuing date the patent that cover some of the TrueType bytecode instructions are US 5,155,805 and US 5,159,668 which were both filed on 1989-05-08, so the second rule applies, and we need to look at their issuance dates to determine their expirations. they are, respectively, 1992-10-13 and 1992-10-27, corresponding to expiration dates of: 5,155,805: October 13, 2009 5,159,668: October 27, 2009 note that there is also an additionnal patent, namely US 5,325,479 which was filed in 1992. It took me a very long time to realize what its purpose is, because the wording is extremely similar to the 805 one; and it struck me that this third patent covers *approximations* to the exact computations covered by the 805 patent. Apparently, someone at Apple realized that you didn't need to get 100% accurate results in the outline distortion to get equivalent bitmaps :-) Fortunately, we don't need to deal with this patent at all. And don't forget that there are equivalent EU, UK and FR patents (at least), which may have been filed later, with even later expiration dates. So we simply can't write this problem off :-( Hope this helps, On Mon, 6 Nov 2006 16:45:42 -, Graham Asher [EMAIL PROTECTED] said: Two of the three patents have already expired, which may be helpful. Graham Asher ___ Freetype-devel mailing list Freetype-devel@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/freetype-devel ___ Freetype-devel mailing list Freetype-devel@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/freetype-devel
