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?
The OP was talking about the authors of TrueType, not FreeType.
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.
[signature]
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.
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.
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.
[signature]
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.
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.
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" ~
Glenn, is that you?
-- Sig under construction...
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).
+1 inciteful
[signature]
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.
(1)DOCOMEFROM!2~.2'~#1WHILE:1<-"'?.1$.2'~'"':1/.1$.2'~#0"$#65535'"$"'"'&.1$.2'~'#0$#65535'"$#0'~#32767$#1"