I think the issue is that if people want to use Apple's renderers to display fonts nicely, Apple wants people to pay for that technology. This is independent of what kinds of hinting etc are in the fonts themselves. The alternative is for FreeType to develop its own renderer. But that is just the take I have on it.
Your take on it is close, but not wholly accurate. The issue is that a particular kind of instruction may be included in fonts, and a rasteriser that interprets that instruction is using Apple's patented technology. So it is not quite so simple as developing your own renderer -- which is what FreeType *have* done --: if your renderer actively interprets the instructions employing the patented method you are using Apple's intellectual property. The instructions in question are really only important in controlling diagonal strokes for b/w rendering, but if they are present and ignored -- as FreeType currently ignores -- they can cause problems with diagonal stem weights and angles in both b/w and greyscale rendering. [I'm not entirely sure what the MS CLearType renderer does with these instructions: a whole set of x-direction instructions are deliberately ignored in ClearType.] I'd be interested to know what percentage of fonts actually contain these instructions. I suspect it may be the minority of 'super-hinted' fonts like Arial and Times New Roman that were developed for maximum screen legibility in b/w rendering. Not all font development tools even support these instructions, and for most people it is easier to make a font without these instructions than with them.
Now, surely *that* is more than anyone on this list wanted to know. Can we go back to character encoding now?
John Hudson
Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com Vancouver, BC [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Theory set out to produce texts that could not be processed successfully
by the commonsensical assumptions that ordinary language puts into play.
There are texts of theory that resist meaning so powerfully ... that the
very process of failing to comprehend the text is part of what it has to offer
- Lentricchia & Mclaughlin, _Critical terms for literary study_
