Re: [Devel] beating the patents - an idea

[Werner LEMBERG]

> * 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?

There is a famous (highly mathematical) paper by John Hobby which
describes how to do that.  Deriving hints would be based on
autohinting, so there can't be patent problems.  The problem is that
this process is very time consuming (solving linear equations with a
few thousand variables) and can't be done at run-time.  At some time
we might add this, but it needs a lot of time for research and
implementation which we don't have currently, given the many other
problems which should be solved earlier...


    Werner