From: Dom Lachowicz (doml@appligent.com)
Date: Mon Apr 29 2002 - 11:38:12 EDT
Our own Robert Wilhelm (row) was a founder of Freetype and could be of
some use here, maybe. He's been surprisingly silent on the issue :)
The only patented bits in the TrueType spec, IIRC, relate to true-type
hinting at small font sizes (<10pt). Freetype has an actual
implementation which parses and honors those bits of data to produce
awesome looking glyphs at small font sizes. It also has an auto-hinter
which doesn't pay attention to those specific bits and produces
less-than-stellar looking glyphs.
This is all determined at compile-time. If we were to release our own
binaries where *we* shipped freetype *statically* linked into the
binary, we would probably be safest disabling the code that breaches
apple's patent, unless we would have to setup our download in a country
where Apple's patent isn't valid/honored.
However, many linux/unix distros ship versions of freetype which have
the hinting code enabled. We could easily ship an AbiWord which
dynamically links against freetype.so or freetype.dll, and let the
packager sort things our (i.e. on win32) or the user (i.e. on linux).
This is the route that I would recommend - we avoid patent issues while
still getting great results. But then again, I don't have too much
sympathy for people who complain that fonts look crappy at <10 points.
Dom
On Fri, 2002-04-26 at 09:55, Tomas Frydrych wrote:
>
> > Where does Apple hold these patents?
> From the docs that accompany the latest stable release, I
> understand USA and Japan, but that might not be accurate -- the
> FreeType document is not certain about this and it is dated 1999.
>
> > To what extent can we turn this on and then have a HUGE DISCLAIMER that
> > Americans and others with crazy patent laws may not use it. According
> > to FreeType.org some distributions turn it on by default.
> It needs to be pointed out, that this does not need to be turned on at all,
> FT has its own algorithms for dealing with the patented issues, and from
> what I understand, they work quite nicely (perhaps Leonard would be a
> better person to comment on this). But I think if it comes to it, we should not
> provide official releases with the patented stuff enabled.
>
> Tomas
>
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