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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."
Actually, MS got access to it the same way any Mac developer does - by linking to /usr/X11/lib/libfreetype.dylib.
Seriously Slashdot, what's next - OMG Microsoft is using GCC to compile Office for Mac!
(Oh, the irony... the captcha for this post was "obvious")
IIRC, FreeType with all the hinting turned on looks more like ClearType than Apple's renderer, and positioning is pixel perfect relative to ClearType - therefore, it's actually to make Mac Office look MORE like Windows Office, not less.
Exactly. If I recall previous statements from Microsoft properly, Office and Office for Mac are based on two completely separate source trees. This is one of the reasons that VBA was dropped in the 2008 version of Office for Mac -- they couldn't justify the enormous effort that would have been needed to port a new VBA to OS X, or to develop it from scratch. So your point about the cost of porting or reimplementing ClearType is spot on.
A more interesting question to ask is what portions of Freetype are they using and to what purpose. Rendering? Why not use Apple's native rendering engine? People have argued for years over the advantages and disadvantages of Apple's rendering tech relative to MS. MS has traditionally favored visual sharpness at the cost of precise positioning of the characters relative to each other. The cost of that is that at a detailed level, what you see on the screen may not accurately reflect what will be printed. Apple has gone the other way. The characters may look a bit fuzzier, but the positions are proper (again, at a very detailed level) relative to where they should be.
At least for some Windows applications over the years, the position inaccuracies have caused trouble when it comes to printing. Some word processing programs will (infrequently) get different line-filling results depending on whether they are writing to the display or to a printer. In the worst case, this causes a paragraph to be either one line longer or shorter in the printed document. Depending on how the app handles image placement, the results can be... interesting, as stuff gets pushed onto different pages in different ways.