Le sam 11/05/2002 � 16:32, Danny Tholen a �crit :
> 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.

I don't think we have lawyers (nor money) to work on that..

And we really don't want to start fighting with Apple on these
problems..

> 
> > 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?

Since you saw the problem with Arial fonts, you can understand why the
Freetype developers didn't activate the bytecode interpreter.. And we
can't either..

-- 
Fr�d�ric Crozat
MandrakeSoft


Reply via email to