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."

Comments

Must burn.

[Zarf]

I don't know who wrote TrueType but MS using FreeType must burn them up. I know it would tick me off.

Re:Must burn.

[Lunix Nutcase]

Why would it burn them up? There is no financial justification for porting Cleartype when they can just use for Freetype for their Mac version. If they were switching the Windows version to Freetype that would actually be a story.

Re:Must burn.

[Monkeedude1212]

They're obviously using the Mac as their testbed - notice its also in a beta.

If its a success on the Mac, it'll make its way to Windows soon enough.

They wouldn't want to test it on Windows - if its a massive failure it'll hurt the Windows image... But not on a Mac!

Re:Must burn.

[Lunix Nutcase]

If its a success on the Mac, it'll make its way to Windows soon enough.

And you make this claim based on what evidence? Oh wait, none.

They wouldn't want to test it on Windows - if its a massive failure it'll hurt the Windows image... But not on a Mac!

Well of course. The Mac ports have pretty much always been a second-class citizen to the Windows version.

Re:Must burn.

[digitalhermit]

I suppose it depends on your motivations. Do you do what you do because of hate or because you have a passion about something? Or maybe you're somewhere in between and decide to make the most practical choice.

Re:Must burn.

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know who wrote TrueType but MS using FreeType must burn them up. I know it would tick me off.

Yeah. Presumably some poor bastard slaved their heart out over TrueType and the boss decides FreeType is better.

"Sorry for putting up with my BS all these years ... but you suck!" -- Your Boss

Re:Must burn.

[Zarf]

If they were switching the Windows version to Freetype that would actually be a story.

Good point. I was presuming there already was a Mac version of TrueType. If there isn't one already, you are absolutely right.

Re:Must burn.

[Bill_the_Engineer]

I don't know who wrote TrueType but MS using FreeType must burn them up. I know it would tick me off.

From Wikipedia: "TrueType is an outline font standard originally developed by Apple Computer in the late 1980s as a competitor to Adobe's Type 1 fonts used in PostScript. TrueType has become the most common format for fonts on both the Mac OS and Microsoft Windows operating systems."

There was a story on Slashdot back in July talking about FreeType celebrating the expiration of the Apple's TrueType patent.

Re:Must burn.

[Microsift]

I thought Apple invented TrueType, but maybe I'm trapped in the reality distortion field.

Re:Must burn.

[beelsebob]

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.

Re:Must burn.

[Zarf]

I don't know who wrote TrueType but MS using FreeType must burn them up. I know it would tick me off.

From Wikipedia: "TrueType is an outline font standard originally developed by Apple Computer in the late 1980s as a competitor to Adobe's Type 1 fonts used in PostScript. TrueType has become the most common format for fonts on both the Mac OS and Microsoft Windows operating systems."

There was a story on Slashdot back in July talking about FreeType celebrating the expiration of the Apple's TrueType patent.

Well, I guess it's the Apple software team that should be ticked then, but, I doubt there's any love lost between the Apple and Microsoft guys.

Re:Must burn.

[Lennie]

Doubt it, the Mac version of Office is actually a port done by an external organisation.

I doubt the Mac version functions as some kind of test-bed.

Re:Must burn.

[Monkeedude1212]

And you make this claim based on what evidence?

The same purely speculative one you make your "financial justification" claim. I mean why would they bother developing ClearType if there was a cheap alternative to use? What evidence do you have that implementing Freetype is any easier than implementing Cleartype in a Windows Application on a Mac Environment?

Re:Must burn.

[kimvette]

Zarf wrote:

I don't know who wrote TrueType

Apple did.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TrueType

Re:Must burn.

[ConfusedVorlon]

are you sure?

it certainly used to be built by a Mac group within MS. I have heard stories of the crazy corporate environment that surrounded them...

Re:Must burn.

[acoopersmith]

I don't know who wrote TrueType but MS using FreeType must burn them up. I know it would tick me off.

Well, I guess it's the Apple software team that should be ticked then, but, I doubt there's any love lost between the Apple and Microsoft guys.

The Apple software team that just had to put out iOS 4.0.2 to fix the FreeType security hole that allowed people to jailbreak their phones (or get hacked by a more evil website with a malicious PDF)? If it's good enough for the company that originally developed TrueType and held the key patents, why not use FreeType?

Re:Must burn.

[Skuld-Chan]

Ironically Apple invented Truetype ;).

Re:Must burn.

[bbk]

Well of course. The Mac ports have pretty much always been a second-class citizen to the Windows version.

Only recently. Excel originated on the Mac - 1.0 was Mac-only in 1985.

 

Re:Must burn.

[Zarf]

I don't know who wrote TrueType but MS using FreeType must burn them up. I know it would tick me off.

Well, I guess it's the Apple software team that should be ticked then, but, I doubt there's any love lost between the Apple and Microsoft guys.

The Apple software team that just had to put out iOS 4.0.2 to fix the FreeType security hole that allowed people to jailbreak their phones (or get hacked by a more evil website with a malicious PDF)? If it's good enough for the company that originally developed TrueType and held the key patents, why not use FreeType?

I'm not saying they shouldn't.

Re:Must burn.

[PhrostyMcByte]

TrueType is a font standard, which has largely been succeeded by OpenType. TrueType was developed by Apple and licensed by Microsoft, while OpenType was co-developed by Adobe and Microsoft.

On Windows, Microsoft has two text APIs: Uniscribe & GDI, which combine to provide text rendering and a whole lot more, and DirectWrite, which is new to Windows 7 and has much better quality, improved OpenType support, and GPU acceleration. These technologies are so baked into Windows that I'm not surprised at all that they wouldn't want to port them to OS X.

Re:Must burn.

[2muchcoffeeman]

If they were switching the Windows version to Freetype that would actually be a story.

Good point. I was presuming there already was a Mac version of TrueType. If there isn't one already, you are absolutely right.

Oh, there's definitely a Mac version of TrueType. Apple developed it 20 years ago to compete with Adobe Type 1 and licensed TrueType to Microsoft for Windows 3.1. It forced John Warnock to open Type 1 and eventually killed Adobe Type Manager. Remember when ATM was something other than a place to get cash or something dirty?

Re:Must burn.

[duffbeer703]

It's done in a Mac Business Unit separate from the Office team.

Re:Must burn.

[2muchcoffeeman]

Apple's never been the best of friends with Microsoft in the first place. No big deal.

Re:Must burn.

[tverbeek]

You're probably right that Office for Mac isn't a test-bed for technology to use in the Windows version, and you are correct that its developers aren't part of the Office-for-Windows development team. But the Mac Business Unit is hardly an "external organization". I'm not sure where it is in the corporate hierarchy this year, but it's headquartered at their Redmond campus, where yes: they get funny looks as they carry their MacBooks around. By the way, Excel was not ported to the Mac; it went the other way around: Excel for Mac pre-dated Excel for Windows by a couple years (delayed by the development of... Windows).

Re:Must burn.

[timeOday]

Why would it burn them up? There is no financial justification for porting Cleartype when they can just use for Freetype for their Mac version.

So you're saying there is no financial justification for using Microsoft software when you can just use free software because it's just as good? Gee, I would think Microsoft would be wide open to that rationale.

Re:Must burn.

[Dog-Cow]

Given that the context is desktop software, you have a very strange idea for the term "recent".

Re:Must burn.

[VGPowerlord]

Well of course. The Mac ports have pretty much always been a second-class citizen to the Windows version.

Only recently. Excel originated on the Mac - 1.0 was Mac-only in 1985.

Mac ports have been second class citizens for no less than 15 years. In computing terms, 15 years is not "recently."

Re:Must burn.

[michael_cain]

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.

Re:Must burn.

[PsychicX]

Which is part of the Entertainment and Devices divison of MS, for some crazy reason.

Re:Must burn.

[Lennie]

OK, seperate from the Office-team. I stand corrected.

Re:Must burn.

[symbolset]

Also, 1985 may have been more than 15 years ago.

Re:Must burn.

[yyxx]

ATSUI is more akin to Pango than FreeType; Microsoft probably has their own Pango-like functionality in Office.

Last I looked, the Mac platform was technically significantly behind Pango in rendering complex scripts.

Re:Must burn.

[TheoCryst]

Not any more. During the big E&D shakeup earlier this year (during which Robbie Bach, the leader of E&D, left the company), the MacBU was moved into the greater Office group.

They do, however, continue to operate as a separate and semi-autonomous group therein.

Re:Must burn.

[bragr]

Strange, the only thing that I can think of is that the xbox uses PPC and Macs used to.

Re:Must burn.

[makomk]

Helps make the financial results for Entertainment and Devices look better. Remember that they lost truely vast sums of money on the XBox and XBox 360...

Re:Must burn.

[VGPowerlord]

Also, 1985 may have been more than 15 years ago.

I know, I wasn't measuring from 1985. I was measuring from when Windows 95 came out.

Re:Must burn.

[644bd346996]

Of, to put it another way, Microsoft gave up on the idea of WYSIWYG, and Apple didn't. Even though the original selling point of TrueType was that the fonts on-screen would match the printer's fonts.

Re:Must burn.

[jonbryce]

According to Wikipedia, Apple wrote TrueType.

Re:Must burn.

[An ominous Cow art]

Hey, some of us try to live every day as if it were still 1985.

Re:Must burn.

[beelsebob]

Odd, last time I checked, Pango on OS X just called out to ATSUI/CoreText because it dealt with complex scripts significantly better than Pango's own engine.

Re:Must burn.

[cgenman]

The Mac office team is small, light, and fast. There was a time in the XP days when Office on the Mac was considered better than Office on Windows. It gets certain features later than the windows version, if ever. But the core feels faster, more responsive, and less buggy. I'd take Office on the Mac any day over Office on Windows.

Re:Must burn.

[Jesse_vd]

*Citation needed

Re:Must burn.

[Zarf]

Again, I ask why? I just don't follow your logic.

My logic is this:

• working is hard
• someone's boss asked them to do it
• the same boss threw the work away
• workers should be pissed

As I said, "I don't know who wrote TrueType" but I was under the impressions that:

• TrueType works on Mac
• Someone chose not to use it
• The people who wrote TrueType on Mac just had their work wasted

This all is predicated on the idea that people wish their work to be:

• valuable
• useful
• not thrown away

Granted this argument does not hold if people do not value their work, care if it is used, or care if it is thrown away.

Based on your lack of understanding I presume one of the following is true about you:

• you do not value your own work
• you do not value yourself
• you do not invest yourself in your work
• you do not think of other people's work as being valuable
• you do not care about other people

While you may not follow my logic I follow yours perfectly. This indicates that either

• my logic does not make sense
• I am smarter than you

I can accept either outcome.

Re:Must burn.

[maxwell demon]

Interesting point: why would the Apple software team use FreeType for PDFs, when PDFs don't use TrueType?

AFAIK PDFs are allowed to contain TrueType fonts.

Re:Must burn.

[Zarf]

Don't take it personally, you posted AC so I was having fun. I rarely let loose like that. It was cathartic.

Re:Must burn.

[yyxx]

Says who? URL/citation?

(The unfinished native port may use ATSUI, but that doesn't mean the choice was made based on quality.)

Re:Must burn.

[Gilmoure]

Apple invented True Type.

Re:Must burn.

[Gilmoure]

That guy that hangs out at Starbucks; he didn't work out?

Re:Must burn.

[Angostura]

Absolutely. The first version of Office for OS X - Office v.X was released in 2001 and (aside from the lack of a proper Outlook client) was at least as good (and aesthetically rather nicer) than the then current Windows version. Embarrassingly, it's the version I still use - I've never really seen any compelling reason to upgrade, though I may shell out for 2011.

Re:Must burn.

[ais523]

Exactly. If I recall previous statements from Microsoft properly, Office and Office for Mac are based on two completely separate source trees.

This seems pretty plausible, especially due to the wide difference in bugs between them. The fact that this is the case is rather worrying, though; well-written code is nearly always easier to port by changing platform-specific parts, than by rewriting it, unless it mostly consists of optimised assembler or something inherently nonportable like that, and I don't see why Word would be. Even in the case of Mac OS X vs. Windows, where there are very different interface guidelines, you'd still expect to have a shared engine and separate interfaces. (Perhaps it's for marketing reasons? It's entirely possible that the Windows version of Word has been deliberately tied very strongly to Windows, and I recall something about undocumented APIs used by various internal teams at Microsoft to gain an advantage over other internal teams; although that wouldn't inherently mean there wasn't a reason why the Mac version couldn't be ported to Windows, Microsoft might not want to so they could maintain the tying.)

Re:Must burn.

[duck99]

I have a mac book pro.. its a nice machine but office deff loads faster in windows.

Re:Must burn.

[michael_cain]

This seems pretty plausible, especially due to the wide difference in bugs between them.

For the most part I can live with the differences between Word on Windows and Word on my Mac. The differences in Excel are a real game changer. Too many academics that I deal with use Excel as it exists on Windows as a de facto standard computing platform, including both Solver and VBA. Excel is the main reason I keep a virtual machine with Windows on the Mac.

Re:Must burn.

[gig]

> I was measuring from when Windows 95 came out.

Since that is the start of computing? We're talking about MS Office, which is a Mac app from the 1980's.

As far as the original point about the Mac versions of Office being second-class citizens, that was only true for the later parts of the 1990's. From 1985-1992, the Mac versions were the only versions, and during the 21st century, the Mac versions have been as good or better than the Windows versions. They're just different, in keeping with the fact that users buy MS Office on the Mac, not CTO's, and on the Mac, there is competition in office software.

But MS Office is a shitty app on any platform. The vast majority of users are better off with smaller, more-focused apps that are specific to what they are actually doing. MS Office is like a Swiss Army Knife with 1000 blades, it takes you so long to get out the right blade, you are better off just carrying a regular knife and a can opener and a screwdriver if that's what you need. And if your main thing is presentations, you should use Keynote. Period. Even if you have to buy a Mac or iPad just to do your presentations, they will pay for themselves immediately when your presentations get 100 times better with no extra effort on your part.

Re:Must burn.

[Hal_Porter]

Entertainment and Devices divison

Aka "toys and gadgets". Doesn't seem so crazy to me.

Re:Must burn.

[process]

>> Hey, some of us try to live every day as if it were still 1984.

There. Fixed that for you.

Re:Must burn.

[bennettp]

Remember when ATM was something other than a place to get cash or something dirty?

Asynchronous Transfer Mode?

Re:Must burn.

[drinkypoo]

Exactly. If I recall previous statements from Microsoft properly, Office and Office for Mac are based on two completely separate source trees.

This seems pretty plausible, especially due to the wide difference in bugs between them. The fact that this is the case is rather worrying, though; well-written code is nearly always easier to port by changing platform-specific parts,

...unless it uses secret functions which aren't present on other platforms...

Re:Must burn.

[VGPowerlord]

I was measuring from when Windows 95 came out.

Since that is the start of computing? We're talking about MS Office, which is a Mac app from the 1980's.

Here, let me reestablish the context of what I said, since you seem to have lost it:

Mac ports have been second class citizens for no less than 15 years. In computing terms, 15 years is not "recently."

and that 15 years was measuring from when Windows 95 came out. Why? I'll answer that shortly.

As far as the original point about the Mac versions of Office being second-class citizens, that was only true for the later parts of the 1990's. From 1985-1992, the Mac versions were the only versions, and during the 21st century, the Mac versions have been as good or better than the Windows versions. They're just different, in keeping with the fact that users buy MS Office on the Mac, not CTO's, and on the Mac, there is competition in office software.

See? You even agree that Mac versions of Office started being second-class citizens around 15 years ago. However, I contend that it wasn't just during the later parts of the 90s, but also the 2000s.

You see, shortly after Windows 95 came out, Office started incorporating new applications that only appear in the Windows versions of Office. The most well known of this being Outlook.

Now, I'm not an Outlook fan, but even I've got to admit that a corporate email and appointment scheduler is a useful edition to the Office lineup.

Office for Mac has Entourage, but it's... inferior to Outlook. To the point where Mac Office 2011 is finally getting a real version of Outlook, while Entourage goes away like a bad memory.

Even then, though, Windows Office has a number of additional programs that, as far as I know, won't appear in the Mac version. Those programs include things like OneNote, InfoPath, Communicator, and SharePoint WorkSpace (formerly Groove). These started appearing in the mid-2000s... and while some of them may not sound useful, some of them are. SharePoint Workspace/Groove, for instance, is a collaborative editor for Word documents.

Re:Must burn.

[An ominous Cow art]

Agreed, 1984 is the better year. I gradumacated from high school :-).

Overblown

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Overblown

[BitZtream]

And that will never happen because cleartype is only a tiny subset of functionality built on top of the more important bits.

Freetype has the same functionality as cleartype tacked on to the end.

Cleartype can't load and render fonts on its own, it depends on other functionality of the OS to load and render the fonts, it just fixes the sub pixel rendering on the end to make it look nice. Take cleartype out of the equation and you still get font rendering, its just not as nice on an LCD.

Take freetype out of the question and you get no ability to load a TrueType font, so the ability to do sub pixel rendering is irrelevant.

It would be retarded to port ClearType to OSX because it would be missing prerequesits and ... OSX already has a TrueType rendering library with sub pixel precision ... its free type.

You don't understand what FreeType and ClearType actually do.

Of course the summary is overblown. MS products running on the Mac generally do use the native features rather than reinventing the rule. Look at the dependancies for Office 2008 and the MS RDP client for OSX. Its fairly clear they don't just 'port code' blindly, they actually use the system libraries when and where they should ... They even support native features that don't exist in Windows, such as the Mac OSX Keychain for storing passwords. MS's Mac group does this as SOP, so its certainly not newsworthy.

Re:Overblown

[lahvak]

I agree that the summary is completely idiotic, especially since TrueType was patented by Apple, not Microsoft, as the summary claims, and the patents has since expired.

However, there is something interesting about it. MS could have used the native font rendering engine on OS X. They had at least three options: native renderer, freetype, or port cleartype. I am not surprised that chose not to port, but their choice seems to indicate that freetype does good enough job emulating cleartype rendering, better than the native renderer. This does not mean that freetype is better than the native renderer, it just means that it is better at emulating MS's cleartype.

Hold Me, I'm Scared

[eldavojohn]

Microsoft proclaims they love open source, rumors of Ballmer's departure ... and now this?

Maybe god does exist?

Re:Hold Me, I'm Scared

[__aayejd672]

Hell is starting to get a bit chilly.

Re:Hold Me, I'm Scared

[o'reor]

Flying pigs spotted here too.

Re:Hold Me, I'm Scared

[LinuxIsGarbage]

It started to get cold over two years ago... http://port25.technet.com/archive/2008/04/01/open-source-day-at-microsoft.aspx

Re:Hold Me, I'm Scared

[garcia]

Flying pigs spotted here too.

Pigs are the replacement for chairs once He leaves?

Re:Hold Me, I'm Scared

[Danathar]

Using finite terms to describe infinity is contradictory.

Re:Hold Me, I'm Scared

[david@ecsd.com]

And hundreds of chairs in Redmond breathe sighs of relief.

Re:Hold Me, I'm Scared

[bhtooefr]

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.

Re:Hold Me, I'm Scared

[msuarezalvarez]

You use words like "zealots" and yet you have not even bothered to minimally read up on what you are supposedly talking about... FreeType cannot be inferior to TrueType because the two are absolutely incomparable. What you said is more or less the same than saying that Apache is actually inferior to HTTP.

You do not even end up looking silly...

Re:Hold Me, I'm Scared

[Danathar]

Mathematically yes.

But you can no more prove a set is finite by empirical test then you can prove that pie will not at some point start repeating numbers after calculating it out to a some point. It's good for engineering at the scales people exist but does math have any hope of describing the fundamental nature beyond what we can empirically prove by experiment. Probably not.

Besides, Science is about the Natural world. Not the Supernatural one (God). Confusing the two ends up making people mad.

Re:Hold Me, I'm Scared

[Hawke666]

mmm...pie...

Re:Hold Me, I'm Scared

[dunkelfalke]

Is Pink Floyd recording a new album?

Re:Hold Me, I'm Scared

[bucky0]

I'm confused about what this statement means at all. It is certainly and easily provable that pi is irrational and that all irrational numbers will never repeat their pattern. I think even the greeks knew at least one of those statements.

Similarly, it's possible to prove that any set is either finite or infinite...

Sorry, I'm just totally confused.

Re:Hold Me, I'm Scared

[jack2000]

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.

Re:Hold Me, I'm Scared

[kriston]

This works until you try one of the new Windows Vista fonts designed specifically for ClearType. These fonts are: Calibri, Cambria, Candara, Consolas, Constantia, Corbel, and Cariadings. In my other post on this topic I describe how these fonts look so good in Windows Vista (and later) but so badly in Freetype of any configuration. There are ClearType-specific hints in these fonts that Freetype simply does not use which makes these fonts so nice in Windows but nowhere else.

Re:Hold Me, I'm Scared

[Randle_Revar]

Like Dave McAllister of Adobe(!) said, "the axis of evil has shifted south about 850 miles or so"

Re:Hold Me, I'm Scared

[drinkypoo]

Adobe is more incompetent than evil in my book. Sure, they want to be masters of their own proprietary stuff, but the important bits of PDF and indeed of Flash are open to reimplementation. They do create a lot of security problems, but I see no evidence that they're actively trying to do so.

Re:Hold Me, I'm Scared

[Danathar]

Math is not reality. Math is based on axioms which themselves are based on self-evident truths. Math (and words) is nothing more than what we use to describe a seemingly shared reality.

You take on faith that the world you see outside of your eyeballs is real but you have no independent evidence that it is. Your brain could be floating in a vat somewhere with electrodes sticking out of it and how would you know? You don't, but you accept without question that what you see is in fact real.

You can put a label on something...tree, chair, rock and in so much as it seems to be a single entity at the scale you can experience directly that it is, it's true to you. Problem is, we can't ever confirm this beyond our direct experience of it and even that is taken on faith (my first example).

Science can only be used with what we experience and how we explain it. It can't say anything beyond that. The question of is there anything beyond human existence is a non-sequitur. It can't even be logically expressed without contradiction.

the word infinity or god can't even begin to describe the two concepts (or one...Infinity is..Infinity). The symbol of Infinity is not infinity, it's the symbol and can't adequately be equivalent.

Language which uses words to define concepts can't be used to describe that which is undefined. Undefined is like lack of evidence. Undefined...is...Undefined and nothing more. Lack of evidence is not evidence of absence, it's just lack of evidence. Nothing can be said other than that.
'

Re:Hold Me, I'm Scared

[bucky0]

I'll concede that many times language isn't a good map between words and concepts, but it doesn't take faith for me to be able to say "Pi is irrational", and it's not ridiculous for me to use an axiomatic method to decide logical statements that are defined in an axiomatic universe of discourse.

Oh, I didn't realize I was being trolled. Nevermind.

Am I missing something?

[mayberry42]

Where's the link to the source article? Or is this yet another anti-MS rant?

Re:Am I missing something?

[A12m0v]

How is this anti-Microsoft? I think it is a good thing that Microsoft is using Freetype.

Re:Am I missing something?

[Lunix Nutcase]

Yeah, but only for the Mac version. This summary is trying to make it seem like Microsoft or the Office team is dumping Cleartype for Freetype which is not true.

Re:Am I missing something?

[MrHanky]

No, it's not.

Re:Am I missing something?

[Lunix Nutcase]

Yes it is. The implication is quite clear in this sentence:

Somehow they figured out the free software "clean room implementation" of their own (patented) TrueType technology must better suit their needs."

This is nothing but Microsoft saving time and money by using Freetype that is already ported to the Mac instead of doing the work to port Cleartype. This a non-story at best.

Re:Am I missing something?

[xtracto]

Yes it is. The implication is quite clear in this sentence:

Somehow they figured out the free software "clean room implementation" of their own (patented) TrueType technology must better suit their needs."

This is nothing but Microsoft saving time and money by using Freetype that is already ported to the Mac instead of doing the work to port Cleartype. This a non-story at best.

You mean, it is like FreeType "suits better Microsoft's needs" when porting MS Office to OSX??

And they indeed dumped ClearType for Freetype for this OSX version; that is a true assertion. The fact that they decided to compile others code instead of use their own is exactly that.

Re:Am I missing something?

[jimshatt]

Not every story has to be about MS doing something stupid. If they do the right thing by using FreeType, that's still a story. At least, I thought it was interesting.

Re:Am I missing something?

[MrHanky]

And this implies they're dumping Cleartype just how? I don't see it. The summary says specifically that it's about the OS X version.

Re:Am I missing something?

[VGPowerlord]

You keep saying ClearType when TFA says TrueType. Are you confused?

No, because Office 2007 and 2010 on Windows use ClearType for font rendering. Even if you have it turned off at the OS level.

Re:Am I missing something?

[risinganger]

Assuming the wikipedia entry for TrueType hasn't been buggered about with then it's summary (there is no article) that is confused.

Re:Am I missing something?

[yyxx]

Microsoft and Apple marketing tell you that their proprietary software is supposedly superior, and Microsoft marketing tells you that using open source software contaminates your software. Obviously, if both Apple and Microsoft use FreeType for key products, in preference to software that they would only have to port, that shows that their marketing is lying. This may not be news to nerds, but it is certainly a good argument to use when negotiating the use of FOSS with management.

Re:Am I missing something?

[wootest]

They didn't have ClearType on Mac OS X. ClearType is a trade name for their strategies for subpixel anti-aliasing rendering in Windows XP and later, as available in GDI, WPF and DirectWrite. It's hard to "dump" something you don't have.

They "didn't port it", most likely because porting would have been a rewrite. I'd be surprised if the three implementations on Windows share any code at all beyond a few basic algorithms.

Truetype is Apple's technology

[WillAdams]

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

Re:Truetype is Apple's technology

[Anonymous Coward]

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")

Re:Truetype is Apple's technology

[AshtangiMan]

Wow. So the truetype library is called "libfreetype". Interesting. Oh yes, the irony is quite thick . . .

Re:Truetype is Apple's technology

[Bizzeh]

please look up the word irony... this is not ironic

Re:Truetype is Apple's technology

[AshtangiMan]

Whoosh.

Re:Truetype is Apple's technology

[lahvak]

Actually, MS got access to it the same way any Mac developer does - by linking to /usr/X11/lib/libfreetype.dylib.

Wow! How did they manage to do that on a Windows machine back in 1989? I know MS programmers are beast, but linking to a library from a completely different operating system, especially a library that has not even been written yet, that's quite an achievement. They must have used some sort of magic, that's how they circumvented Apple's TrueType patents, too.

EEE

[mark72005]

I'm confused. What is Microsoft trying to EEE by doing this?

Re:EEE

[mark72005]

Eunuch balls?

Is this one of those "define 'nothing'" questions my philosophy professor used to ask?

John Calvin said, "Nothing is what sleeping rocks dream about."

Re:How Do You Figure?

[Lunix Nutcase]

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.

But not for the version for the premier platform for the software. It's used in the second-class citizen port to the Mac. This is just a way for them to save time and money.

You misread his comment.

[Chirs]

The OP was talking about the authors of TrueType, not FreeType.

Add To That (Re:Must burn.)

[EXTomar]

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.

Re:Add To That (Re:Must burn.)

[Zarf]

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.

Re:Add To That (Re:Must burn.)

[Zarf]

I never said "no ethical person should work there" however I was dumb enough to reply to an AC.

Re:How Do You Figure?

[Zarf]

No, the FreeType guys should be proud. The original Mac TrueType team should be a bit steamed. Presumably there was some Mac TrueType team that just had all their hard work tossed out. Another poster pointed out that there may not be a TrueType implementation in house at Microsoft that works on the Mac.

If there isn't a Microsoft TrueType for Mac team then no harm no foul.

Patents expired

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:How Do You Figure?

[KlomDark]

Mac users shouldn't even be allowed to be citizens.

Simply owning an Apple product is a clear statement that a person has no concern for their own rights or the future of mankind.

No better than uneducated slaves, keep them in their cages to protect the true thinkers from their short-sited views.

Bail out.

[Murdoch5]

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".

Re:Bail out.

[Mongoose Disciple]

Except it's not all of a sudden.

You may have missed the last few years of relevant stories.

Re:Bail out.

[Murdoch5]

I know it's not all of a sudden, but they do seem to take take take and forget to give give give.

Re:Bail out.

[recoiledsnake]

Freetype is under a BSD style license. If it was GPL, then the whole of MS Office for Mac would've to be GPL'ed in order to comply. I guess that's what he meant when he said that.

Re:Bail out.

[yyxx]

Microsoft has been using open source software under the BSD license for many years (e.g., networking related software); they like the BSD license. So, open source has been "bailing them out" for years. They hate the GPL. Their marketing doesn't make such fine distinctions and they simply like to portray FOSS as inferior and dangerous in general. You see a similar disconnect with Apple, saying one thing to geeks, another to business types (Apple has to tread more lightly in that regard because they obviously use tons more FOSS).

Re:Bail out.

[lahvak]

Fail!

First, as freetype license is BSD, they are not stealing anything. They have complete right to use it.

Second, they don't do it to get better fonts. They are using a library that 1) emulate their own cleartype engine well enough for their purposes and 2) already exists on OS X. There is no indication anywhere that freetype is better than their own cleartype. It may be, and when we see them ditching cleartype and using freetype on Windows, we may conclude that it is, but until that happens, MS is simply doing the obvious and using already existing library on OS X instead of wasting time and money porting their own.

The interesting part is that they chose freetype over the native OS X engine.

Even more interesting would be if they contributed back to freetype. They are under no legal obligation to do that, but it would certainly make their recent proclamations of love for open source sound more sincere.

Re:Bail out.

[Mongoose Disciple]

I don't think it's forgetting so much as that's just they roll.

Some companies are purely hostile to open source (e.g. cancer-era Microsoft.)

Some companies will use open source projects when it helps them, but aren't going to contribute a ton of value back. (Most companies fall into this bin, including modern Microsoft, Apple, etc. And yes, I'm aware of the crap they've open sourced -- I consider it to amount to not a lot of value, you may disagree.)

Some companies have a business model based on contributing a lot of source to the community. There aren't a lot of these, and when there are, they usually have a business model involving making most of their money on services relating to the product they're creating or selling you a non-free fork or variant of said product.

All that being said, I'm not sure what you're hoping for. MS has transitioned from a 1 to a 2, and doesn't have the kind of business model that would make it as a 3, so that's probably about as far as it goes.

What actually happened

[Bizzeh]

"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"...

TrueType in Mac OS 7

[tepples]

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.

Re:TrueType in Mac OS 7

[Zarf]

I guess the Apple guys just got dissed on by the Microsoft guys then... but that's certainly not news.

Re:TrueType in Mac OS 7

[Blakey Rat]

*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.

Re:TrueType in Mac OS 7

[plazman30]

TrueType was written by Apple and given to Microsoft. At the time, Apple was having a huge tiff with Adobe and was trying a printer definition language that could replace Postscript. They made a cross licensing deal with Microsoft. Apple was to provide the font technology and Microsoft was to provide the printer language called TrueImage. In classic Microsoft fashion, TrueImage was delayed significantly and when it did finally see the light of day, it was too late, and Apple ended up licensing Postscript Level 2.

Re:TrueType in Mac OS 7

[jameskojiro]

Don't screw around with Calcium or you could trigger a "Helvetica Level Event"!!!

Re:TrueType in Mac OS 7

[ChaosDiscord]

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._

As of last month FreeType turns the bytecode hinting on by default, as the last patents expired in May.

Re:TrueType in Mac OS 7

[Creepy]

The TrueType patent(s) you're referring to expired earlier this year (as Slashdot reported). ClearType is actually still patented, but freetype uses a prior art modification to avoid any patent issues. See the freetype patent page

Re:TrueType in Mac OS 7

[kriston]

This is correct, but not a complete story. The most important parts of Cleartype fonts are not just the subpixel rendering but that these fonts include special hinting instructions in each font to control the subpixel renderer. Those special hinting instructions are what makes Cleartype work as well as it does, and Freetype does not do this.

These hinting instructions are not and, to hear the Freetype folks say it, will never will be implemented by Freetype. Not only are these hints proprietary and patented but they are also entirely undocumented.

Cleartype fonts in Freetype, like the new fonts that appeared with Windows Vista, look nothing like they do in Windows. I have treid every configuration of Freetype using any combination of bytecode, slight/medium/strong autohinter, the "unpatented" subpixel renderer, and antialias. Try it yourself. You'll need an understanding of the Fontconfig library to try it out.

Cleartype isn't just about subpixel rendering. To think that is to miss the point of what Cleartype is all about.

Re:TrueType in Mac OS 7

[tepples]

Cleartype fonts in Freetype, like the new fonts that appeared with Windows Vista, look nothing like they do in Windows. I have treid every configuration of Freetype using any combination of bytecode, slight/medium/strong autohinter, the "unpatented" subpixel renderer, and antialias. Try it yourself. You'll need an understanding of the Fontconfig library to try it out.

Have you tried applying hint transformations only to the Y coordinate? That'd simulate what GDI ClearType does, which (as I recall) involves hinting the outlines for 864x96 dpi (a factor of 9 across), rendering as monochrome, convolving the result horizontally with a 9-tap box filter, decimating by 3 horizontally, and finally drawing that with subpixels.

Re:TrueType in Mac OS 7

[quacking duck]

Perhaps Microsoft wants to make the appearance of text the same across all platforms.

Apple got soundly roasted when they first released Safari for Windows, and it rendered fonts the Mac way instead of the Windows way. As a Mac user at home but Windows at work, I'm forced to agree it was a bad idea, and the latest versions of WinSafari have a "Windows standard" font smoothing option.

If Microsoft is trying the same thing in reverse (and I realize this is your own speculation), they had better include an option to go with normal Mac font rendering.

Re:TrueType in Mac OS 7

[kriston]

Yes, I have tried that configuration, but as I tried to say earlier, there are hinting instructions inside each font that control Cleartype's subpixel renderer, and Freetype does not use them. It controls much more than doing the technique you describe. These hints control, among other things, the grid-fitting and other aspects of the rasterizer to closely control how the fonts are displayed on the screen for best visual sharpness at the expense of perfect shapes, as well as filtering the rendered glyph to mitigate "color fringing."

Your comment is helpful but it's important to understand that the special, proprietary Cleartype hinting is what makes Cleartype what it is. The hints are applied for each glyph. The technique you're describing is a generic, broad application of one of these techniques. The Cleartype hints are the "secret sauce" that makes Cleartype work so well on the screen in Windows Vista and later.

Thanks.

Re:TrueType in Mac OS 7

[ranulf]

... decimating by 3 horizontally, and finally drawing that with subpixels.

Interesting use the the word decimate there...

ATSUI is not for Windows 7

[tepples]

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.

Re:ATSUI is not for Windows 7

[tepples]

It's not likely MS will replace their hardware-accelerated Windows APIs with FreeType.

Unless Microsoft has found ways to run parts of FreeType in hardware. There are advantages to doing this: fonts that don't have good hint programs, for example, look better in FreeType than in ClearType.

They included freetype (not linked) I think

[Ilgaz]

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.

Re:They included freetype (not linked) I think

[drolli]

I would not wonder if "word for android" appeared in the app stores.

Re:How Do You Figure?

[m.ducharme]

Needs more +1 Funny. Are you going for the elusive +5 Flamebait?

They can, in matter of months

[Ilgaz]

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.

Re:They can, in matter of months

[yyxx]

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).

Re:They can, in matter of months

[IICV]

And occasionally the same file if you open and close it. What the hell, Microsoft? You still can't create a stable file format?

Blame Adobe, seriously

[Ilgaz]

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

Re:How Do You Figure?

[risinganger]

wow, using Microsoft products has left you bitter!

Re:How Do You Figure?

[shutdown -p now]

Indeed. Another way to write a flame baiting title for TFS here would be "Mac text rendering sucks so much that Microsoft uses Freetype instead" ~

Don't be tricked by PR

[Ilgaz]

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.

Re:How Do You Figure?

[the_fat_kid]

Glenn, is that you?

TrueType, OpenType, Type 1...

[Anaerin]

Who needs 'em! Give me my Compugraphic Intellifont fonts back!

Re:How Do You Figure?

[KlomDark]

Something that doesn't forbid you from installing apps only from a hand-picked list of crap officially blessed by the great Steve would be a good start.

Re:How Do You Figure?

[QuantumBeep]

It looks like you want a Lenovo laptop running Fedora Core.

Re:How Do You Figure?

[Zarf]

+1 inciteful

Re:Whats wrong with CoreText?

[maxwell demon]

Would using Core Text imply licensing costs?

Linking to X11 is wrong unless you are GIMP

[Ilgaz]

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.

Wrong one, hate-boy

[Imazalil]

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.

Just because they ADDED FreeType ....

[Ungrounded Lightning]

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?

Re:Just because they ADDED FreeType ....

[Zarf]

Don't bother me with details. I have an inciteful story to not read and make wild assumptions about!

Re:How Do You Figure?

[ais523]

Annoyingly, Slashdot "fixed" that bug, in that the adjective doesn't show up at all if it contradicts the score. I preferred it the old way.

Re:Whats wrong with CoreText?

[Shin-LaC]

No.

lands in ?

[molecular]

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.

Great Scott!

[Rix]

Watch out for the Libyan terrorists.

Re: 1985

[TaoPhoenix]

Awesome time for music.

Not so good when the cutting edge of computing was the DOS Clone wars.

It's on iTunes

[lullabud]

Yeah, it's a featured album this week on iTunes, their new preferred release platform.

Re:How Do You Figure?

[Nutria]

Inciting to what? Riot?

Re:How Do You Figure?

[Zarf]

Exactly. I would have said "insightful" otherwise. Slashdot often rewards inciteful over insightful.

TrueType is Apple's, not Microsoft's

[gig]

> 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.

Re: 1985

[KingAlanI]

There was Bruce Springsteen, Madonna; way before Nirvana, there was U2 and Blondie

Whitesnake, Van Halen, and Motley Crue too.

Decimation

[tepples]

Interesting use the the word decimate there

If you're interested, read more about the use of the term in signal processing.

Different From?

[andersh]

As opposed to the exact same thing from Microsoft on Windows Phone 7?