They have been doing this for years on Annual Passes. The apparent reason for the recent expansion of the system to include all tickets was the introduction of the ridiculously complicated "Magic Your Way" pricing structure last Januray, which makes it incredibly cheap to add extra days to a pass after the four-day mark (to encourage longer stays). It would seem Disney wants to keep people from spending the few extra dollars to add days only to sell the pass with days still remaining. So now every ticket gets tied with a biometric ID. The bottlenecks created from everyone having to fool with the scanners means they often disable them at peak entry periods.
On the contrary, what you describe is precisely what hinting is. Some refer to TrueType hints as "instructions" because they are more specific as compared to Type 1 hints. Changing the outlines so that the font renders differently at different sizes is typically referred to as "delta hinting."
this has nothing to do with patents
I honestly don't know a whole lot about FreeType, I just remember reading about the issue here.
You do need to convert Mac format T1/TTF fonts before they will work on a PC. Moot point though, since most vendors offer both formats anyway. OpenType fonts will theoretically work across both platforms without any conversion. (Speaking of which, incorporating advanced OpenType features to Linux applications such as Scribus might even give them an edge over the competition, since no one except for Adobe seems to be interested in adding them to their Windows/Mac apps.)
I don't think Microsoft uses "heavily hacked" fonts so much as they use well-hinted fonts. Apple does, too, in addition to their Quartz anti-aliasing. Lucida Grande (the main Mac OS X UI font) looks terrific at small screen sizes even without any anti-aliasing, thanks to impeccable hinting. If I'm not mistaken, the FreeType engine excludes certain TrueType hinting features by default since they are patented by Apple. That's the main display issue on Linux. Anti-aliasing helps some, but the engine must utilize the built-in hints to produce the best display.
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Actually, most of it is Chalkboard, Apple's inexplicable clone of Comic Sans.
Here's a page with some more information on the system used at Disney World. http://allearsnet.com/pl/fingerscan.htm
They have been doing this for years on Annual Passes. The apparent reason for the recent expansion of the system to include all tickets was the introduction of the ridiculously complicated "Magic Your Way" pricing structure last Januray, which makes it incredibly cheap to add extra days to a pass after the four-day mark (to encourage longer stays). It would seem Disney wants to keep people from spending the few extra dollars to add days only to sell the pass with days still remaining. So now every ticket gets tied with a biometric ID. The bottlenecks created from everyone having to fool with the scanners means they often disable them at peak entry periods.
Actually, the first edition was not "definitive." Seriously, it was just titled "MySQL."
It appears that there might already be an effort underway.
On the contrary, what you describe is precisely what hinting is. Some refer to TrueType hints as "instructions" because they are more specific as compared to Type 1 hints. Changing the outlines so that the font renders differently at different sizes is typically referred to as "delta hinting."
I honestly don't know a whole lot about FreeType, I just remember reading about the issue here.
You do need to convert Mac format T1/TTF fonts before they will work on a PC. Moot point though, since most vendors offer both formats anyway. OpenType fonts will theoretically work across both platforms without any conversion. (Speaking of which, incorporating advanced OpenType features to Linux applications such as Scribus might even give them an edge over the competition, since no one except for Adobe seems to be interested in adding them to their Windows/Mac apps.)
I don't think Microsoft uses "heavily hacked" fonts so much as they use well-hinted fonts. Apple does, too, in addition to their Quartz anti-aliasing. Lucida Grande (the main Mac OS X UI font) looks terrific at small screen sizes even without any anti-aliasing, thanks to impeccable hinting. If I'm not mistaken, the FreeType engine excludes certain TrueType hinting features by default since they are patented by Apple. That's the main display issue on Linux. Anti-aliasing helps some, but the engine must utilize the built-in hints to produce the best display.
Coliseo is actually a knockoff of Koloss. See also Nick Curtis' version called Phat Phreddy.