Re: Bug#156503: microsoft changed its policy, msttcorefonts broken
On Thu, Aug 15, 2002 at 12:10:30AM -0700, Michael Cardenas wrote:
> My main concern at this point is that it may be infeasible to generate
> high quality truetype fonts without using apple's patented truetype
> instructions (which is only a small subset of instructions, but they
> are commonly used in fonts). I've contacted one of the freetype
> authors to ask him what he thinks about this.
As far as I can tell, it's the rendering which is patented, not the
font information. So you can create TT fonts with the hinting information,
and for example freetype2 can use it if you enable the bytecode interpreter.
Otherwise it will use its auto-hinter to generate plausible output.
You might want to boycott the patented features, though, and design the
fonts so that they will (only?) render nicely using the autohinter.
As an alternative, would it be acceptable to simply point at Apple and
laugh at their silly patents? I've been looking at one of them
(US patent 5,155,805), and it's a patent on basic math. You take a point
and two vectors, project one vector on the other, and add it to the point.
That's ALL. But if the point is part of a glyph outline, then this
operation is Intelecutal Prupperty of Apple.
(For reference, the USPTO patent search engine is at
http://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/srchnum.htm
Unfortunately, it doesn't generate useful urls for individual patents.)
--
Richard Braakman
"I sense a disturbance in the force"
"As though millions of voices cried out, and ran apt-get."
(Anthony Towns about the Debian 3.0 release)
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