Slashdot Mirror
Freetype Lands In... Microsoft Office?
phy_si_kal writes "Now Microsoft must love free software. Indeed, Office 2011 for Mac (beta 5 at least) uses Freetype! Somehow they figured out the free software 'clean room implementation' of their own (patented) TrueType technology must better suit their needs."
I don't know who wrote TrueType but MS using FreeType must burn them up. I know it would tick me off.
[signature]
This is an overblown summary. Come back to us when they switch the version of Office for Windows to using Freetype over Cleartype. This is clearly nothing but a way to save money by leveraging Freetype that already runs on Macs instead of wasting time and money porting Cleartype.
Microsoft proclaims they love open source, rumors of Ballmer's departure ... and now this?
Maybe god does exist?
My work here is dung.
Where's the link to the source article? Or is this yet another anti-MS rant?
Their ``Royal'' font format.
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/truetypehistory.mspx
Microsoft got access to it by trading to Apple their ``TrueImage'' PostScript clone (seen that used anywhere lately?)
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
I'm confused. What is Microsoft trying to EEE by doing this?
I don't know who wrote TrueType but MS using FreeType must burn them up. I know it would tick me off.
That's odd, I would be kind of embarrassed of the flattery that the largest behemoth of a software company finds your code good enough to use in what is arguably the most widely used and popular suite of office software.
... well, FreeType won't be going away anytime soon. Did I miss some lawsuit or animosity between the two in the news?
...
And if they become dependent on it
Not a single line of the code I've given to open source has been good enough to get this kind of attention so I don't understand how anyone could be upset that Microsoft is basically promoting you (even if only to Mac users).
Not everyone is full of autohate, you know
My work here is dung.
The OP was talking about the authors of TrueType, not FreeType.
The focus on "web inter-op" and publishing. If they are striving for "looks the same on PC, Mac and on the web", their chances are better if they start using a font typeset that is freely distributable to those platforms.
Go to www.truetype.org and read the section on patents.
"All patents related to the TrueType bytecode interpreter have expired since May 2010. More information regarding this topic is available at our patents page."
All patents were originally held by Apple up to May 2010.
If they are making a Mac version of Office, why didn't they use Apple's Core Text instead? It is much faster then FreeType. Maybe they are still targeting Tiger?
Has anyone noticed that when Microsoft needs help and wants to be saved all of sudden Open Source appears in there software. Once again we see right here that when they want better fonts it's Open Source to the rescue, but then again to quote there CEO "Linux is a cancer", he forgot to add, "But we need to steal from them to make our software work".
"shall we port truetype to mac, or let the idiots have crappy looking fonts?", "hmmn, i cant really be arsed porting truetype to a crap operating system", "hey, guys, check this out, someone has already done the hard work, and its free source too. that means our product will look good, mac users wont feel left out and we can all look cool and get some free publicity by using free software"...
portfolio
TrueType has been in Mac OS since System 6 (as a kernel extension) and System 7 (standard). In Mac OS classic, as in Windows, the rendering engine uses a "hint" to fit the outlines to the pixel grid. These hints are stored as a bytecode program in the font that modifies the outline; the patent covers this use of bytecode. (FreeType can be configured to use these hints or, especially in jurisdictions with software patents, to create its own hints purely from the outline shapes.)
Microsoft's ClearType rendering engine stretches the outlines horizontally by a factor of 9 before applying hints, which messes up fonts that don't expect this *cough*Helvetica 14px "mnr"*cough*. But because Mac OS X uses antialiasing for all text, it ignores most hints. Perhaps Microsoft wants to make the appearance of text the same across all platforms.
What I find odd is that they don't just use ATSUI – apple's built in true type font rendering, which is rather better than both freetype and cleartype.
ATSUI and the Core Text that replaced it in Tiger are Mac-exclusive. If Microsoft used it for Office, it wouldn't be able to ensure consistent document appearance between Mac and Windows versions of Office.
If you link to that particular lib, you must be using X11. Don't link to anything X11 on OS X since it is strictly optional part of OS X install. I don't think MS would require X11 client to have their office to run.
Oh if MS woke up and adopted itself today, their "Office for UNIX" (I bet they would name linux/bsd one that way) would link to it. Of course, not a chance.
I agree to whoever you reply to, pretty ironic that Apple uses/licenses freetype too. I smiled when I saw the note on iPod touch license.
And while on it, their Mac Business unit blog is one of rare MS blogs to follow, for example they had to deal with much more strict gcc coming with XCode/Leopard while compiling MS Office. It is not a "big secret" or anything, OS X Office is truly a Mac program. I heard they experimented with the "actual MS Word on win32" port to Mac OS. Their customers went nuts. They got tricked by "Why doesn't MS Word for Mac doesn't have this?" feedback originally.
It is Microsoft's political/business choice not to ship a UNIX Office. They are clearly capable of doing it. Funny is, it could sell well, but you can only see from amazon top 10, like mac office which people keeps bitching but always on top 3.
Perhaps they could do some "cloud" fashion thing on Android but, would never ship a real thing on it.
That is the part of MS which needs to change.
MS and Apple hit the panic button when they have seen relying on Adobe postscript technology to display text may have serious consequences.
Adobe validated the panic by asking for ridiculous amount of money. They also managed to drive SJobs and Apple nuts, yes both. Rest is Truetype :)
http://truetype-typography.com/tthist.htm
Apple and Microsoft doesn't "hate" eachother or they don't conspire eachother. I bet MACBU (at MS) is one of the most privileged Developer teams on Apple's OS X Development, I mean for bug reports, help etc.
MS Office is always and always on top 10 of Amazon's best selling software. Even more interesting, in current (dynamic) list, Mac version is just 1 place below Win32 version.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/software
I bet not using ATSUI has something to do with Apple's "font display philosophy" and "MS font display philosophy". Yes, both companies have their own take on how fonts should be displayed on screen. Apple prefers strict display, MS prefers more relaxed/looks better on monitor display. That is why first Safari for Windows looked alien on Windows (besides widgets).
While on it, as I just "cleaned Adobe font caches" of a designer running OS X, Adobe uses their own engine which wants a perfect "cache" to work right.
Who needs 'em! Give me my Compugraphic Intellifont fonts back!
Maybe I'm the only one noticing this...
But portion copyright Marti Maria... It seems they are using liblcms too :)
There is always a chance that user haven't installed X11 at all. OS X is very strict, it also allows you to remove X11 from installation via pkgutil even if you have installed it with OS X install.
Things like these gave birth to fink project and macports, especially dealing with OS X X11 libs, even if you are MS, impossible.
For example, Gimp on 10.5 required you to have a fresh,new X11 (unofficial by apple) named XQuartz. Not just linking, linking to a particular/new version is wrong. Of course, if you are MS, not X11 based app maintainer/developer.
Yeah it's all cool to hate on the iPhone/iTunes ecosystem these days, but iOS is a little bit different from OS X. This is the one where it's all overpriced, too shiny, and you get charged for service packs.
Lets keep the hate-boyism straight.
I don't know who wrote TrueType but MS using FreeType must burn them up. I know it would tick me off.
Did they REPLACE FreeType with TrueType? Or did they throw in FreeType, or a piece of it, as an additional kitchen-sink or for some particular function?
All I see, kicking off this article, is a copyright notice as required when some code from FreeType has been included in the product. Where's the evidence that it replaced TrueType, or even that all of FreeType, rather than some small chunk - say, for importing fonts - is in use?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
shouldn't it read "freetype dynamically linked by ms office"?
I'm sure there's quite a list of opensource libs used by microsoft office already.
still notable, since it says something about their own implementation and maybe the portability of their code.
Watch out for the Libyan terrorists.
Awesome time for music.
Not so good when the cutting edge of computing was the DOS Clone wars.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Yeah, it's a featured album this week on iTunes, their new preferred release platform.
I would be interested to know what licensing decisions went into freetype. Freetype is licensed under two licenses: the GNU GPL and a license that allows proprietary derivatives. I would need to know more about this particular situation before I could say more about freetype's licensing beyond the obvious consequences. But this freetype situation is a good opportunity to look at a more general case, which I'll try to elaborate on below.
Generally, this is part of the reason why people license their work under the GNU GPL—a strongly copylefted free software license—alone. Those who license under the GPL generally don't mind people developing commercial software based on GPL'd work, the free software movement is not at all anti-commercial software. The objection is against building proprietary derivative works: software that doesn't share their work with the community on terms that respect users' software freedom, just like the code that shared with the derivative work developers. The GPL says to share and share alike and this helps create and maintain a commons in which we can all share while still respecting our private right to run, share, and modify.
We can increase the odds that proprietors have to decide between writing their own code and building on a strongly-copylefted code that would have made derivatives free software as well. Just to forestall an anticipated oft-repeated objection: "Force" is not the issue here as there is no forcing developers to develop based on strongly-copylefted free software in the first place. Developers can always write their own code.
As it is, non-copylefted free software licenses typically turn developers into charitable contributors for proprietors. We've known about this issue for a long time but appeals to popularity ("think of all the users you'll have!") instead of improving the free software commons sometimes win out. The FSF has sage advice on this ground:
Apparently any improvements proprietors make to freetype code are only shared with the free software community if the proprietor so chooses. Assuming they share any changes at all, those changes may be shared under terms that make them unusable to free software projects: perhaps their changes will implement code that is covered by patents making those changes useless even if the changes are licensed to share, or the changed code may be licensed in other ways that is useless to FLOSS (such as binary-only implementations under a proprietary license). In this instance, Microsoft has no obligation to share under terms useful to FLOSS as a fair exchange for distributing work based on freetype code that was so generously shared with Microsoft.
Digital Citizen
> Somehow they figured out the free software 'clean room implementation' of
> their own (patented) TrueType technology
Apple developed TrueType in the 1980's because Adobe's licensing fees for PostScript typefaces were out of control. Microsoft licensed TrueType from Apple in the early 1990's and it appeared first on Windows in v3.1.
TrueType is not central to typography in OS X, which is font-format agnostic and renders true WYSIWYG. Everything on the screen of an OS X device is a PDF that displays the same on low or hi -res screens or print. TrueType compatibility in OS X is done via FreeType as far as I know, not via the original Apple implementation from before OS X. So that is why Microsoft is using it for TrueType compatibility on OS X as well.
This article just suffers from lack of Mac knowledge. It would also sound strange to a Windows user to know that PowerPoint features MPEG-4 playback, but not to a Mac user, because on the Mac, PowerPoint has been able to do that for years. And it would sound strange to a Windows user to know that Microsoft Word can run bash shell scripts, which it can do on the Mac via AppleScript. It might be strange to consider that MS Office Mac has been running on a Unix core for 10 years. It's all very mundane to Mac users.
I don't know who wrote TrueType but MS using FreeType must burn them up. I know it would tick me off.
Apple created Truetype (originally called Royal.) That was when Adobe had a death grip on high quality font technology in the form of their encrypted Type 1 font much to the frustration of both Apple and Microsoft (and competing font vendors.) To take Adobe down Microsoft and Apple cooperated with a joint strategy. Microsoft bought Bauer enterprise which had a shoddy postscipt clone which became TrueImage and Apple provided the Royal font which because TrueType. Rather than lose the entire business (postscript AND fonts) they finally cavedand published the Type 1 font spec. It helped that Bauer Postscript was over-hyped junk developed offshore and never became commercially viable. As usual Microsoft bought the number two postscript clone brand at number two quality. The number one brand Postscript clone was offered by Phoenix Technologies who eventually captured most of the market by winning HP, then principally a printer company. Phoenix spun off that group to focus more on their core bios technology as postscript became more and more a commodity product. However TrueType lives on. The point of TrueType was never to lock up the font business but to allow font vendors to compete on an equal footing (to Apple and Microsoft's benefit.) If Microsoft is embracing FreeType it is probably to get away from Apple which still owns TrueType. Not all that surprising.
There was Bruce Springsteen, Madonna; way before Nirvana, there was U2 and Blondie
Whitesnake, Van Halen, and Motley Crue too.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Interesting use the the word decimate there
If you're interested, read more about the use of the term in signal processing.
As opposed to the exact same thing from Microsoft on Windows Phone 7?