From: Robert Wilhelm (robert@gaston.camelot.de)
Date: Tue Apr 30 2002 - 01:25:49 EDT
On Mon, Apr 29, 2002 at 11:38:12AM -0400, Dom Lachowicz wrote:
> 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 :)
>
It is very time consuming to follow the discussion here.
Please everybody interested in this topic look at
http://www.freetype.org/patents.html.
Some additions:
- normally hinting is only needed for small font sizes e.g small screen
fonts and for bigger sizes (e.g. bigger screen fonts, printing)
it is encoded in the font that hinting should not be used.
- high quality fonts often have bitmaps embedded for really tiny sizes
to get even better quality there.
- the FT autohinter does a very nice job.
- There are quite a few commercial developers (e.g. game designers)
which use FreeType even under windows.
- We should dynamically link to FreeType libs and therefore we are
sure that we have no potential patent infrigement issues.
- The patents mentioned on the freetype website are only valid
in US. Maybe similar patents exist in other countries, maybe not.
- In my very personal opinion the patent is quite trivial
( projection in 2D space), and there maybe prior art.
However even if the patents are invalid you would have to spent
lots of money to prove it...
- FreeType is ported to many, many systems including the
embedded world.
That said, IMHO we should definitely use FreeType in the
next release.
Robert
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