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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)."
Apple apparently uses FreeType in the iPhone. Go to settings->General->Legal and you get the long list of projects uses in the iPhone; the Freetype project is mentioned about a third of the way down (right below the copyright notice for ncurses).
I suppose Apple had no issue recompiling with the flag turned on.
BTW, anti-aliasing is useful in 2 situations only: if you are rendering fonts in big sizes (bigger than 13px)
And guess what: LCD subpixel rendering stretches the font outline horizontally by a factor of three as its first step. So if you're rendering a font at 9px, it's as if you were rendering it at 27px across.
or if you have bad, non-hinted fonts (as Bitstream Vera)
Case in point: I had to switch a client's web site from Helvetica to Arial (sorry, smug typophile weenies) because Helvetica's hints handle this stretching poorly, causing the upper bowls of letters like m, n, and r to overshoot the x-height by a whole pixel. When FreeType's autohinter performs better than Microsoft ClearType with BCI on Helvetica, something is up.