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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.
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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.
Where's the link to the source article? Or is this yet another anti-MS rant?
The OP was talking about the authors of TrueType, not FreeType.
Wow. So the truetype library is called "libfreetype". Interesting. Oh yes, the irony is quite thick . . .
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.
If that's the motivation and MS starts pushing back on some of its other in house technologies substituting OSS versions... if I had been an MS developer writing the original versions I might read that as a vote of "no confidence" from my own managers. That would prompt me to look for other work because what I was doing at MS would not be valuable to either MS or the industry as a whole.
But, I don't work at Microsoft. And other posters have pointed out this may not be at all what is happening in this case.
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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.
Needs more +1 Funny. Are you going for the elusive +5 Flamebait?
Rule of Slashdot #0: You and people like you are not representative of the larger population. - A.C.
*cough*Helvetica 14px "mnr"*cough*
Ok, I'm going to get modded down, but could we stop with the "cough cough" thing? Just say, "like Helvetica 14px." Like a normal human being writing a normal forum post. The "cough cough* thing, assuming it was ever funny, hasn't been funny in years. Now it does nothing but make your post harder to read, and make me think you have no actual sense of humor.
That said, good, informative, post.
Comment of the year
Maybe five years ago, it would still have made a difference. These days, the damage is done: Office alternatives are compatible enough, and people don't need to replicate Microsoft's idiosyncrasies precisely anymore because nobody expects them to work always (they don't even work consistently between Windows and Mac, or different Windows versions).
I respectfully disagree. Science is about knowledge. There is no world even among the fictional ones and theoretical universes that can not be studied, even theoretically.