[Devel] beating the patents - an idea

[rorylyttle]

Hi, hope this email ends up somewhere near the right place... -please
forward it for me if it does not, as it just might be important.

Don't worry replying to this email unless you would like to.

I have come up with some suggestions/possible ideas for the
freetype engine, perhaps they could solve some big problems for you:-

* To get around the patent problem with true type font rendering,
-would it help at all to provide your own "hint-files" to accompany
many of the main popular ttf fonts? (arial, times new roman etc.) thus using
your own database of good hinting adjustments at various common small sizes?
The rendering engine would look for a corresponding "hint file" for the
font it was using and read the list of hints from it for the size, angle
etc. that it was trying to render.
In fact, would it break any patents to use your existing rendering engine
(with a license) to generate the list of hints for you? you could make a
custom version of it which outputted the hints to a file.
(perhaps the patent only covers the formulae, not the actual values of the
hints...)
You might even be able to provide the customized engine to those who wanted
it to create their own hint files for their own fonts which they might have
hinted themselves.

All the best, maybe this is useful !
 
address@hidden

PS, check this carefully, as I am NOT a lawyer!