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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[duffbeer703]

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

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.

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

[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:Am I missing something?

[A12m0v]

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

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: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.

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.

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: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" ~