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FreeType Project Cheers TrueType Patent Expiration
FlorianMueller writes "The FreeType project celebrates the expiration of Apple's TrueType bytecode patents. The open source font rendering engine now has the bytecode technology enabled by default. The relevant code existed for some time, but the project felt forced to disable it and advise everyone not to use it due to patent encumbrance. The 20-year maximum of validity of software patents is long, but sometimes the stuff that becomes available is still useful. The Unisys GIF patent was an example. And anything open-sourced 20 years ago would also be patent-free by now (except for the code that has since been added)."
The bytecode in question is about hinting and gridfitting (try Googling those terms): it tells the rendering engine (e.g. FreeType) how to scale fonts at small sizes so they look good. By default, FreeType just scaled text down, which can make it hard to read at small sizes and give blurry edges. Although it did make some efforts to guess what would make good grid alignment decisions, they couldn't used the wealth of information that some fonts' designers painstakingly design into their work by default. It's one of the reasons why fonts on Linux look like crap at small sizes, especially with antialiasing turned off. (Remember that Windows never had problems when fonts were just displayed as black and white!)
could not find their way around these patents for two decades
Sure, there was a way around the patents: be incompatible with TrueType.
That's how PNG was invented to work around the patents on GIF.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Here's a side-by-side screenshot of Linux font rendering with and without the now patent-free byte code interpretation: http://avi.alkalay.net/2007/01/freetype-with-bytecode-interpreter.html
There's this image (left without bytecode, right with) I found which has a comparison for a number of fonts, but the site mentions that other patches were also included, so it may not be entirely representative. Perhaps someone else can find a better example.
Please correct me if I am wrong.
Okay - consider this your correction.
While what you say is true in the theory of how patents should work - it is not how it is applied today. People abstract a lot of the methodology to claim that their idea IS the methodology.
Useful font stuff here:
http://linuxtweaking.blogspot.com/2010/03/fedora-12-improving-awful-font.html
I've just enabled byte code support on my laptop - makes a big difference.
AT&ROFLMAO