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Freetype Lands In... Microsoft Office?

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the share-well-everyone dept.

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."

32 of 212 comments (clear)

  1. Must burn. by Zarf · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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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    1. Re:Must burn. by Lunix+Nutcase · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Must burn. by Zarf · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

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    3. Re:Must burn. by Bill_the_Engineer · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

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      These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
    4. Re:Must burn. by ConfusedVorlon · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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...

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      VLC Remote for iPhone and Android
    5. Re:Must burn. by bbk · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

       

    6. Re:Must burn. by PhrostyMcByte · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

    7. Re:Must burn. by 2muchcoffeeman · · Score: 3, Informative

      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?

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    8. Re:Must burn. by duffbeer703 · · Score: 4, Informative

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

      --
      Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
    9. Re:Must burn. by Dog-Cow · · Score: 3, Funny

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

    10. Re:Must burn. by michael_cain · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

    11. Re:Must burn. by symbolset · · Score: 3, Informative

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

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    12. Re:Must burn. by TheoCryst · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

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    13. Re:Must burn. by cgenman · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

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  2. Overblown by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  3. Hold Me, I'm Scared by eldavojohn · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    Maybe god does exist?

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    My work here is dung.
    1. Re:Hold Me, I'm Scared by bhtooefr · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

  4. Am I missing something? by mayberry42 · · Score: 3, Insightful

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

    1. Re:Am I missing something? by A12m0v · · Score: 4, Insightful

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

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    2. Re:Am I missing something? by Lunix+Nutcase · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:Am I missing something? by xtracto · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
  5. Truetype is Apple's technology by WillAdams · · Score: 4, Informative

    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

    --
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    1. Re:Truetype is Apple's technology by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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")

  6. You misread his comment. by Chirs · · Score: 3, Insightful

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

  7. Re:How Do You Figure? by Zarf · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

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    [signature]
  8. Patents expired by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  9. Re:How Do You Figure? by KlomDark · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  10. TrueType in Mac OS 7 by tepples · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:TrueType in Mac OS 7 by Blakey+Rat · · Score: 3, Insightful

      *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.

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      Comment of the year
  11. ATSUI is not for Windows 7 by tepples · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  12. They included freetype (not linked) I think by Ilgaz · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  13. Re:How Do You Figure? by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 5, Funny

    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" ~