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Definitely : ) The fonts look really good: http://www.freetype.org/freetype2/index.html

Those patents expired about two years ago, fortunately.

"They don't criticise open source."

No, but they certainly threaten us:

http://www.freetype.org/patents.html

had to deliberately disable it in order to comply with patents. I vaguely recall this happening at least once in another project that involved font rendering.

Yep:

http://www.freetype.org/patents.html

On Slackware I manually recompiled Freetype to enable the bytecode interpreter. Debian (and, presumably, Ubuntu) ship with the bytecode interpreter already enabled.

'One of the requirements is that the be able to render TrueType fonts. Correct rendering of Acid3 requires displaying a TrueType font called "Ahem"'

According to this Ahem is is in the public domain

"The big question: Does correct rendering of Ahem in Acid3 require the patented parts of TrueType?"

Freetype and Patents

"Myth 2: Apple Is Suing (or Sued) FreeType

This complete myth apparently started with this article on the SlashDot news site. Too bad the editors did neither care to check the submitted link nor even tried to contact us, we could have helped them!

It is true that we have been contacted by Apple's legal department, but that has never been in the clear intent of suing us, which isn't too surprising given that FreeType doesn't harm Apple in any way."

This does not affect the users directly, but it is a major pain for integrators/porters. OO.o has a terrible habit of bundling all of the 3rd-party software packages, that it uses, into its own source tree. I'm talking about (probably missed some):

• agg
• bash
• bitstream-vera
• bsh
• bison
• boost
• curl
• db42
• dmake
• expat2
• freetype
• icu
• jpeg
• firefox (or some other Mozilla-based browser)
• libmspack
• libsndfile
• libtextcat
• libwpd
• libxslt
• neon
• nss
• nspr
• python
• sane-backends
• STLport
• unixODBC
• unzip
• vigra
• xmlsec1
• xt
• zip
• zlib

If they could, I'm certain, they would've bundled Java too, but — fortunately — Sun's license prohibits that... Now I realize, that this is done to offer "a single package" to those, who build it on their own, but nobody does. Everybody gets these from their OS' integrators. And the pain for us is enormous, because to force OO.o build to stop its silly ways is a serious undertaking. For some of the above packages there is --with-system-foo configure-flag, but not for all, and the default is to always use the bundled one, so support for the external ones bitrots quickly...

Most of the local builds don't bother and so end up wasting disk space and CPU-time rebuilding packages, which are external to OO.o. The end results are also bloated, duplicating stuff, that's already installed on the users' systems and without bug-fixes, which have already gone into each of the respective package since its most recent "bundling" into OO.o tarballs.

Download a source tarball and see for yourself... Something like: tar tjf OOo_OOG680_m9_source.tar.bz2 | grep 'z$'. No other software project does this on this scale and for good reasons — it is Just Wrong[TM]. OO.o better clean up their act in this respect...

Patent #6,307,566 is only a small part of ClearType - there are quite a few subtleties, like color fringe prevention, subpixel specific font metrics, and other details only a font geek could love. There are at least 10 patents covering "ClearType".

http://david.freetype.org/cleartype-patents.html

Yes, indeed Cleartype sucks, and ive not even known you can have it under linux. For an ever better font setup you can enable BCI in freetype and have freetype display font quality on par with Mac OS X (which nobody can dispute displays the best quality). For example ubuntu people can download debs with prepatched freetype here http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=343670&hi ghlight=feisty+fonts.
The standalone patches are here http://david.freetype.org/lcd/

Out of curiousity, do other major distributions enable this either? In other words, is this news at all?

A page on the FreeType project site says:

However, I've previously been under the impression that most distributions would ship at least without some features covered by patents. On the other hand, it's not only MS who owns patents that concern subpixel rendering, and I don't know who owns what, so that's why I'm left wondering if someone else actually knows.

I agree that OpenOffice.org is a bit bloated, but to be honest, i don't really care as long as it get's the job done (it also got better with OOo 2.1). Also, some of your criticisms are just plain wrong. OpenOffice uses Qt Widgets here (for the most part) and it uses the standard widgets on Windows as well. The broken fonts are due to OOo developers using internal APIs of freetype 2.1 which don't exist any more in freetype 2.2 (see http://www.freetype.org/freetype2/freetype-2.2.0.h tml). In fact, the fonts looked perfect here with OpenSuse 10.1, but not with OpenSuse 10.2, which is a shame, really (especially if you consider that the patch to fix this is only 20 lines long).

Yes, OpenOffice could be better. But it isn't all that bad either.

It wasn't too god-awful, actually. I worked with the S60 port of GTK+/KHTML, because it's less painful than Webcore/Webkit, and basically just followed in Nokia's footprints. I had to port several underlying libraries, including Freetype and a massively hacked Nano-X (which I've been slowly replacing with something home-grown, built on top of a platform-specific fast graphics library.)

I've got mostly-correct rendering, correct ECMA/DHTML and good (not great) font rendering. International fonts are tremendously broken. PNG works better than it does on IE. It's pretty reasonably fast, and the browser footprint is about 950k, plus another 200k from support libraries and 300k from the fonts I built in. It's enough to use to roll certain other applications, as long as I'm careful about their RAM usage.

This is actually the reason I originally started the DS WiFi Bounty. The IRC clients and whatnot that are now being built are amusing, but I have bigger plans. (No, the web browser isn't the apex of what I'm doing.)

Look at what Keith Packard did with his font renderer

Give credit where it's due. Keith Packard had absolutely nothing to do with this. It's the FreeType guys which did all the good work.

Patents are protecting some parts of font rendering, thats is why truetype fonts look crappy: http://www.freetype.org/patents.html

Windows font rendering is terrible, I much prefer FreeType's autohinting. I assume you do understand why FreeType defaults to autohinting?

Apple is suing the freetype project, according to slashdot.

Complete myth. See the Freetype patent FAQ. Scroll down to the bottom.

Yes, slashdot reported on this hoax, but actually corrected the story, in their usual wavering manner.

Even if it were true, would you say that the Freetype Project was composed primarily of Apple users and fans?

It's a good thing you posted as AC, so the world doesn't realize what a dumbshit you are. Oh, wait. You might not realize it, but odds are that most people around you already know this about you.

FreeType is free, open source, &c, and I thought it did hinting?

I'm not sure, I've never installed Solaris 10 from CD media

Neither have I actually, I burned the images 3 times and couldn't get it installed successfully from them. I ended up copying the contents of all 3 software cd's to my Linux box, and installing over NFS from that.

What problems did you have? I regularly use libtool on Solaris, and have not had problems. Libtool, despite its complexity (as with all the auto* GNU build system tools) when things go wrong, does a good job 99% of the time.

Mostly problems with GNU binutils -vs- Sun's linker. Basically, any time shared libraries are involved I'd get something like this. Especially when using libtool. I recall this being the cause of much swearing, and fist shaking.

In practice, whether or not anti-aliasing happens and how well depends on how freetype was compiled on the distro and also whether the app is set up to use true type fonts -- many Linux apps are not because they use, for example, gtk1. As gtk2 replaces gtk1 this might improve, but of course there are many apps with random X11 implementations that don't have the support needed to antialias text. I expect change to be somewhat slow outside of the real commonly used apps like browsers.

If you have a license to use Apple's patents on anti-aliased fonts, then you can rebuild FreeType's Font Engine to support pretty fonts. They switched it off due to legal uncertanities, but it is still included with the source code. You have to edit an header file, determine where your Linux desktop distribution stores FreeType's libraries, remake, and install it (as root) to enable it. That sounds complicated, but it is actually really easy to do. Just follow the instructions; you don't have to be a hacker to do it!

If you have a license to use Apple's patents on anti-aliased fonts, then you can rebuild FreeType's Font Engine to support pretty fonts. They switched it off due to legal uncertanities, but it is still included with the source code. You have to edit an header file, determine where your Linux desktop distribution stores FreeType's libraries, remake, and install it (as root) to enable it. That sounds complicated, but it is actually really easy to do. Just follow the instructions; you don't have to be a hacker to do it!

This may have to do with apple's patent(s) on font hinting. Here is freetype's take on the subject.

1. init 3
2. Build and install freetype-2.1.5 or freetype-2.1.6 which are essentially the same. Yes, you will need an old version like this.
3. Replace the following libs in /usr/X11R6/lib/: libXfont, libXft, and libXrender, with the ones from SuSE 9.0.
4. Run SuSEconfig as root.
5. init 5

After that you should have no problems and crashes. I know that's by far not an elegant solution and will greatly appreciate other suggestions!

Samba 3 on a SuSE 8.2 box and Samba 3 on a SuSE 9.1 box export file ownership and permission data! I don't know why this works and I

Oh, and speaking of patents...from the article:

Menus were attached to windows instead of being in the menu bar.

That's because Apple has a patent on having a single menu bar at the top of the screen.

When I was a kid, there was nothing better than candied yams. Couldn't get enough of them. Then one day, I either overdosed on 'em, or my tastebuds changed. Now I can't stand them.

It's a pity; it's one of the few foods where it's considered acceptable to cook with mini-marshmallows.

I yam what I yam. - Popeye

The really interesting bit is that there is a lot of GPL-ed code in XFree.

I take it you mean FreeType which is included under a dual-license of GPL and BSD-like.

Chunks have been copied from the linux kernel, and people like Alan Cox submitted patches

Alan Cox submitted patches are not under the GPL, but he wished to remain compatible with GPL applications (by using the old XFree86 license). The transfer actually has been from XFree86 to the kernel (fbdev).

this is rated intersting?

stop being ignorant!

I would argue to say that fonts on MY linux box look a hell of a lot better than a windows box. they are ALL antialiased. it's pretty.

why is it always A.C.s I get into arguments with.

This is not hinting

On the contrary, what you describe is precisely what hinting is. Some refer to TrueType hints as "instructions" because they are more specific as compared to Type 1 hints. Changing the outlines so that the font renders differently at different sizes is typically referred to as "delta hinting."

this has nothing to do with patents

I honestly don't know a whole lot about FreeType, I just remember reading about the issue here.

Yes nowadays there are no problems with font rendering. I'd even say that Freetype is superior to the Windows XP and OS X font renderers, although I have only seen screenshots of OS X so far, never actually used it. Note that the screenshots on the site also seem to be of an older version, especially the e's in Konqueror look quite bad. This is fixed now though. I wonder whether the patent issues have been cleared up though?

Hmm, I navigated through Adobe's appallingly designed website to no avail, but this talks about some TrueType patents which are apparently applicable to OpenType as well.

But did you really expect anything with Microsoft involved in it to live up to the name 'Open'?

I cannot condone their business practices

And you can condone Apple's business practices:

• patenting scalar products and making sure that FreeType cannot include the bytecode interpreter while using FreeType themselves in their X server;
• killing FireWire by imposing licensing fees;
• ...

Please do not take me wrong: I think that Apple are making excellent products currently, and I'd love to own a mac. But they won't get any money from me.

You could maybe try reading the freetype site.

Some alternatives to ant/make are

• cook (probably the best contender),
• Mk (which is like bitkeeper+make),
• Jam,
• cake (does anyone use this any more?), and
• the Plan 9 mk.

There's also something called Cons, but it needs perl to work. See this.

I haven't found a good alternative to autoconf yet. There used to be Metaconfig, but I don't know who maintains it any more (or where). It produces configure scripts similar to what you see when you configure perl. This guy uses some unreleased software package for his build systems that tend to work really well -- for C code under Unix.

Come to think of it, if someone ports/writes a build tool in C#, you'd be set.

PLEASE - MOD THAT UP!

http://www.freetype.org/jam/

0) Make sure that you've got Xft anti-aliasing already working in X. There are a lot of HOWTOs on the internet for this.

1) Download the freetype2-current sources from here.

2) Extract the sources, cd to the 'freetype2-current' directory, type 'make' twice to build, 'make install' once to install.

3) Back up any libraries of the form *freetype* in /usr/lib and /usr/X11R6/lib to somewhere safe, and then delete them from those directories.

4) Copy the newly built libraries from /usr/local/lib to /usr/lib.

5) Next, get some nice Type1 fonts. You can find these in a lot of places. I personally got the Adobe Type Basics package ($100 for 65 fonts) which is a very good deal. But the Luxi series of fonts that come with X are also pretty good. If you have any desktop publishing software or any Corel software, you might find some Postscript fonts that come with those. As a last resort, just search the internet for Postscript fonts. The nice thing is that with the new FreeType, all the smarts are in the auto-hinter and ps-hinter, so what the font looks like depends only on the glyph shapes themselves. This is a big step forward from the TrueType world, where the quality of the font depended very heavily the quality of the font's hinting. Since hinting TrueType was an extremely difficult process, only expensive professional fonts were any good for on-screen use. In comparison, there are tons of good Postscript fonts out there, since the hinting required for postscript fonts is rather minimal.

Licensing issues with apple

XFT support on Linux! Now we can get cool anti-aliased fonts on Linux!

You must compile from source with --enable-xft and need fontconfig & xft2 package from www.fontconfig.org and of course freetype2 from www.freetype.org

Great thnx to Chris Blizzard for this!

Oh btw now HTML for controls & scrollbars use your native GTK theme widgets when classic theme is chosen.

We know about this. Most users don't notice any problem. Some users have major problems. We acknowledge this and it's another one of our highest priorities for the next version.

The next version will use Pango and FreeType and, on *nix, probably client-side-fonts via xft.
I believe there are still some issues to get printing working properly with these newer *nix font solutions but we welcome any input.

MS Word does do a better job if i18n than us right now but, after tables and footnotes/endnotes, improving i18n is our next highest priority. We have a special metabug right now to track tricky multilinal problems.
Work is already underway to add Pango and FreeType support.

Even without them our Chinese support is very good, our Hebrew support is also very good (make sure you get the bidi-build), and our Arabic support should be good but I'm not sure how much testing it has received.

So try it out with all the languages you want and file some bug reports!

The C++ kitchen sink approach to OO just plain sucks, but I find the newfangled generative stuff intriguing. Back in school we tended to settle on a more manageable subset of C++ functionality. You really don't have to use every obscure feature and than it becomes better. You can also write perfectly fine object code in plain C, using structs and function pointers. In fact, the most beautiful OO design I've seen in a real program is that of the Freetype library, written in C. For embedded folks, C++ is usually a non-option. On many small platforms, you'd be happy if your C compiler is working as advertised.

I don't follow the problem you have with compiler flags. Even if you compile parts of your code with different flags, you can surely still link them together?

Even if Linux desktop installations weren't so horribly deployed as they are by most distributors (I completely lost faith in SuSE after their handling of the Euro-Sign, I think that they are no longer interested in ordinary desktop users), anti-aliasing algorithms itself could probably be much improved, although the Freetype page points out that Apple patents are a problem and some features had to be disabled (damn you, Apple!). All in all, I'm not happy with anti-aliasing support at all, except for subpixel rendering, which works very well on my Notebook. (And don't give me the "You didn't pay, don't complain" bullshit -- I paid a lot of cash to distributors already, but they seem to prefer to spend it on the server end).

"They wont take a stance on whether or not the freetype project may decode their pantented bytecode"

An open source project that uses their own version of Jam are the boost libraries at http://www.boost.org/

Ahh, you are a knowledgeable one. :) I was hoping someone would mention jam. It not only handles platform-dependent tasks, it's a full replacement for make and actually generates correct dependencies. It might be a little tough to convert a make-based project to jam, but it's the way I would go starting out.

boost.build is the build system for the Boost libraries which, as mentioned, uses jam. In fact it uses an advanced version of jam with many new features. I'm not sure if those will be rolloed back into the "official" jam sources (boost jam is actually a derivative of FT Jam, from the FreeType project).

Jamfiles (analogous to Makefiles) are platform-independent. A "Jamrules" file holds all the configuration-specific information. Some systems use autoconf to generate this. Boost does not and their build system is very flexible, allowing one to not only define platform-dependent things but also specify build features such as whether to make static of shared libraries (or both!), optimization levels, etc. A single build run can build shared and static libraries at several optimization levels, for example.

An open source project that uses their own version of Jam are the boost libraries at http://www.boost.org/

Ahh, you are a knowledgeable one. :) I was hoping someone would mention jam. It not only handles platform-dependent tasks, it's a full replacement for make and actually generates correct dependencies. It might be a little tough to convert a make-based project to jam, but it's the way I would go starting out.

boost.build is the build system for the Boost libraries which, as mentioned, uses jam. In fact it uses an advanced version of jam with many new features. I'm not sure if those will be rolloed back into the "official" jam sources (boost jam is actually a derivative of FT Jam, from the FreeType project).

Jamfiles (analogous to Makefiles) are platform-independent. A "Jamrules" file holds all the configuration-specific information. Some systems use autoconf to generate this. Boost does not and their build system is very flexible, allowing one to not only define platform-dependent things but also specify build features such as whether to make static of shared libraries (or both!), optimization levels, etc. A single build run can build shared and static libraries at several optimization levels, for example.

Freetype (and thus X) can support hinting. The reasons you dont see it is because of nasty pantents, explained here

Freetype crew explains:

However, the source code for the bytecode interpreter is still available and can be toggled on at compile time, for those that want to use it anyway (because they purchased a license from Apple, or because they're in a country where the patents do not apply, etc..)

If this is the case then simply go to..

cd pathToFreetype2Code/include/freetype/config

Open the ftoption.h file and find the line that has...

#undef TT_CONFIG_OPTION_BYTECODE_INTERPRETER

Change `undef' to `define' and you should be good to go.

eh... something is seriously wrong with that font. It looks truly ugly. I thought KDE antialiasing used FreeType's renderer? It is a LOT better than that? What has happened??

There are simple newbie-friendly instructions to do this at mandrakeuser.org

Antialiasing and hinting under those desktops are a totally different matter entirely, but at least the fonts are prettier than those horrible T1 fonts (I know there are some beautiful T1 fonts, but those are very expensive to get).

------
C'mon, flame me!

Here's an excerpt:

There's a fairly major controversy with TrueType right now, that there a number of patents that are owned now by Apple. It's kind of interesting to me that that is the case even though it's for the most part derivative work of what was in Metafont.

I've been very unhappy with the way patents are handled. But the more I look at it, the more I decide that it's a waste of time. I mean, my life is too short to fight with that, so I've just been staying away. But I know that the ideas for rendering... The main thing is that TrueType uses only quadratic splines, and that Type1 fonts use cubic splines, which allow you to get by with a lot fewer points where you have to specify things.

The quadratic has the great advantage that there's a real cheap way to render them. You can make hardware to draw a quadratic spline lickety-split. It's all Greek mathematics, the conic sections. You can describe a quadratic spline by a quadratic equation (x, y) so that the value of f(x, y) is positive on one side of the curve and negative on the other side. And then you can just follow along pixel by pixel, and when x changes by one and y changes by one, you can see which way to move to draw the curve in the optimal way. And the mathematics is really simple for a quadratic. The corresponding thing for a cubic is six times as complicated, and it has extra very strange effects in it because cubic curves can have cusps in them that are hidden. They can have places where the function will be plus on both sides of the cubic, instead of plus on one side and minus on the other.

The algorithm that's like the quadratic one, but for cubics, turns out that you can be in something that looks like a very innocuous curve, but mathematically you're passing a singular point. That's sort of like a dividing by zero even though it doesn't look like there's any reason to do so. The bottom line is that the quadratic curves that TrueType uses allow extremely fast hardware implementations, in parallel.

Does FreeType have another website that I'm not aware of?