RE: [ft] Bytecode enabled rendering

[Turner, David]

I've already spoken about this in a previous e-mail.

Microsoft holds a large number of patents covering specific
parts of the ClearType technology, see the bottom of this
page for a non-exhaustive list:

  http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/ip/tech/cleartype.asp

For the moment, we're not going to implement Microsoft's
rendering techniques (which are also documented in a document
named "Avalon Text", that you'll find with a search engine).

Don't expect to have identical rendering in the case of
anti-aliased text with FreeType on Linux.

We could implement it, just like bytecode interpretation,
by disabling it by default in the sources. But very frankly,
I don't care enough about this to spend my time on it.

If you happen to take the time to provide patches to FreeType
and/or libXft to support that, we may even *not* be interested
in integrating them to the official FreeType sources.

You could still distribute a patch however, that distributions
could pick if they want to.

Case closed.

- David Turner
- The FreeType Project  (www.freetype.org)




> -----Message d'origine-----
> De : address@hidden
> [mailto:address@hidden la
> part de Anton
> Danilov
> Envoyé : mercredi 16 novembre 2005 11:00
> À : address@hidden
> Objet : Re: [ft] Bytecode enabled rendering
>
>
> Thanks for the answer, Werner!
>
> I see your point. But what really makes this situation strange and
> unnatural is that Windows makes "undocumented and
> unpredictable" things
> which produce well-documented and predictable results, am I not right?
>
> It's clear that these fonts were designed by Monotype to look
> exactly as
> they look under Windows.
>
> You're speaking about the patch for "these two symbols". I have got
> problems with several symbols on Tahoma 8 pt, some other symbols on
> Tahoma 10 pt, Times New Roman 14 pt.
>
> Maybe, there is some way to fix these symbols on my own if you do not
> plan to create this patch soon?
>
> Anton
>
> Werner LEMBERG wrote:
> >>I am experiencing problems with aliasing-disabled rendering, and if
> >>you look at Kaya's screenshot (my system, and any other will
> >>probably do, shows just the same behaviour)
> >>
> >>http://kayalabs.com/images/tahoma.png
> >>
> >>you will see the difference in rendering Tahoma's 8 and v -- in
> >>freetype's version you have just one more pixel and it's really
> >>disturbing and annoying.
> >
> >
> > This has been discussed at great length on the freetype-devel list,
> > IIRC.  The `correct' rendering result of Tahoma on Windows
> is tightly
> > bound to anomalies in the Windows rendering engine which internally
> > rounds certain values differently, namely in an undocumented and
> > unpredictable way.  With other words, Windows is `wrong'.
> The correct
> > solution is to fix the bytecode instructions for those two
> characters
> > -- this breaks the digital signature, but FreeType ignores
> it anyway.
> > A longer time ago I announced to provide a patch, but
> unfortunately I
> > haven't found enough time yet to do that.
> >
> >
> >     Werner
>
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