On 02/ 3/10 11:36 AM, Peter Schow wrote:
On Wed, Feb 03, 2010 at 10:33:56AM -0600, Shawn Walker wrote:
I doubt you'll ever see font rendering for the freely available versions
of Solaris or OpenSolaris be "as good". In particular, that's primarily
due to the numerous patents surrounding font rendering. You can find
out more about that here:
http://www.freetype.org/patents.html
http://eupat.ffii.org/pikta/xrani/ttf/index.en.html
While a few patents have expired (as of roughly the end of October last
year) more still remain.
So do Ubuntu and SuSE simply ignore this IP? If you run an Ubuntu
VirtualBox guest on an OpenSolaris host (let's say snv_131), and show
OpenSolaris/Ubuntu windows side by side, Ubuntu clearly wins and is
much easier on the eyes, with absolutely no modification on the
Ubuntu side.
Some distributors have chosen based on the expiration of certain patents
to enable *part* of the additional font rendering functionality by
default. However, I don't know if that is true for OpenSolaris yet.
As I said before, you may wish to try the various settings in Systems ->
Preferences -> Appearances -> Fonts to attempt to find something that
suits you better.
Finally, yes, some GNU/Linux distributions (I don't know that Ubuntu is
one) choose to ignore IP-based restrictions on font rendering or simply
use different fonts than OpenSolaris uses.
Font rendering often varies wildly from platform to platform, and this
can be due to a combination of issues, most of which are usually IP-related.
Cheers,
--
Shawn Walker
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