On Thursday 09 May 2002 06:58 pm, you wrote: > > But YANAL, and more importantly, you are not paying if it goes horribly > > wrong. Well, I was just going to commit myself for 1/10 of the cost for a re-examination (about $ 2500), but after some research I think prior evidence is of no importance in a re-examination by the US patent office. Very silly IMO.
But does Mdk has lawyers? If so, they really should have a look. A document with the ttf specs released by Apple in 1990 makes the last patent complete rubbish, and questions the other two, because you should not encourage the use of your patent by trying to make it a standard. > So is this patent the sole reason why true-type (non-antialiased) fonts > look jaggy in Mandrake 8.2? That would mean that we are cooked. yup Again my plea for European mirrors with this stuff, and a direct link in the installer to these hosts. Even SAMBA is threathened by MS patents now it seems. Slight improvement is perhaps possible. In the freetype2 src you find: /src/truetype/ttinterp.c: #undef NO_APPLE_PATENT defining this seems to disable the specific algorithm that is supposedly patented. In other words: you do get a bytecode interpreter (ofcourse you have to enable it first) with a few algoritms for font hinting, but not the patented ones. It is very font-dependent how this will look. I attach a screenshot of 4 MS-ttf fonts enlarged with xmag. Do not use a zoomfactor when comparing them, because zooming will affect how it looks. I think it looks slightly better, exept for some Arial glyphs with lots of diagonals (this is specifically where the algorithm applies) WDYT Fr�d�ric? Danny -- "Yes, it's the right planet, all right, " he said again. "Right planet, wrong universe. "
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