Can Linux use the (supposedly) expired font hinting patents? | Hacker News Reader

Can Linux use the (supposedly) expired font hinting patents?

brainstorm.ubuntu.com

61 pointssandGorgon11 comments

My understanding is that this is pointless, or perhaps counter-productive.

While the patents are owned by Apple, they are not necessary to achieve the Mac OS X look, rather they are needed for old skool Windows style fonts. Think about how old this technology must be if the patents are expiring and what fonts looked like then.

I set Ubuntu to ignore hints entirely and it looks just like Mac OS X. Just compare a simple free font with no hints on Mac vs. Windows or read here about CSS fonts looking rubbish on Windows.

http://www.fontsquirrel.com/blog/2009/11/what-to-expect-from...

This site tells you how to get the windows look on Linux, I've not tried it because that's the last thing I want but it talks about the patented code I think.

http://www.sharpfonts.com/

Isn't hinting taken into account even with sub-pixel antialiasing? I believe that's why Windows fonts appear more crisp

http://codinghorror.typepad.com/.a/6a0120a85dcdae970b0120a86... vs http://codinghorror.typepad.com/.a/6a0120a85dcdae970b0120a86...

I miss the sharp glyphs :-/ Now that Win7 has vertical subpixel antialiasing for smoother scrolling, I really feel OSX needs an improvement of it's font rendering system.

If you would read the update to the article that those images are from, you would see that the differences are due to OS X and Windows using the same information differently. Neither one completely ignores any of the hinting or sub-pixel information. The Windows font renderer is optimized to improve Microsoft's idea of readability on moderate-resolution displays. The OS X font renderer is designed to preserve the look of a font more, so that your screen is a more accurate reflection of how it would look on paper. In reality, the readability of large amounts of text is substantially the same across both platforms. (Spacing issues, such as the differences between Word and TeX, affect readability far more at typical desktop resolutions.) The stylistic differences are simply large enough that it can be distracting when you are used to one renderer and you end up in front of another one.

This seems to be an accurate reflection of my font woes on Mac OS X, especially with my browser. Everything is blurry.

Sorry, but I don't really understand your post.

The fact that an idea is old doesn't mean it's outdated or useless - the patents in question cover functionality that is a major part of Apple's TrueType file format, and FreeType was using an algorithmic workaround to get a similar effect while avoiding the patent (see: http://www.freetype.org/patents.html). It's also likely that these patents also apply to the later OpenType format, which was derived from TrueType.

The cause of "fuzzy fonts" complaints in Windows is ClearType, which is a implementation of sub-pixel rendering, which is rather different from the broader concept of hinting.

The Sharp Fonts website seems to be simply about installing Microsoft's Webfonts on Linux, although it does mention the issue of them looking poor if BCI is disabled in FreeType due to these now-expired patents.

The point of his post was to point out that current Mac OS X font rendering almost completely ignores TrueType hints. Apple owns some patents about it, but that doesn’t mean that they use those patented techniques in their current implementation.

It took me some time to get Linux fonts looking the way I want, and the conclusion I came to appears to be the same as yours: hinting off, subpixel on. Fairly simple compared to some of the funky paths I went down in the past.

I look at that "sharp fonts" page you linked to and I can not react more negatively to the awful stick-thin fonts they seem to like. Awful, awful.

I thought a friend joked when he talked about Sharp Fonts. I saw their home-page and thought it was a joke too.

Apparently not.

Why would anyone prefer text rendered using only 1/3 of the possible pixel-information?

As another Linux-using refugee from OS X, I use GNOME's "Subpixel" setting (which as far as I can tell means "snap to nearest pixel vertically, subpixel smoothing horizontally") and I'm quite a fan.

I must admit, some of my more conservative Linux-using friends use the old bitmap fonts like lucidasanstypewriter-9 and Helvetica, and those hand-pixelled fonts have a crispness and... professionalism that you just can't easily get from soft, comfortable hintless antialiasing.

I'll grant that the "sharp fonts" screenshot posted up-thread is pretty horrible, though.

Check out Monaco or Inconsolata using Mac OS X font renderer. I think it's very comfortable and clear to look at:

http://www.hashref.com/images/inconsolata.png

This is exciting to me because I firmly believe that installing Linux and getting the feeling that it's just not as fun to look at is important. The idea that ubuntu could have some weight to throw around is exciting too. Is there a way someone could donate to this cause specifically? Maybe it's not that far along yet..

I hope this goes somewhere!

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