The term "hinting" was coined by Butler Lampson at Xerox PARC no later than
the mid70s, and was first used to deal with disk access and recovery
heuristics. He wrote about it as a general principle in an article in IEEE
Computer (or IEEE Spectrum) sometime in the early 80s). Hinting was a much
used technique in the 70s. The use of hinting for small characters on a
bitmap screen generated from outline fonts was first used by John Warnock
at Xerox PARC while I was still there (so probably 78 or 79). It is likely
that any more specific use of hinting in this area is either a bogus claim
or can be easily gotten around.
     BTW, some of the FreeTyper's concerns seemed to have to do with the
user interface for moving control points around. I'd be amazed if these
ideas were (a) new, or (b) even patentable. They almost certainly have
nothing to do with our main interests (which is to use their small
efficient plugin as a rendering engine).

Cheers,

Alan

----------

At 9:02 AM -0800 12/11/99, Andrew C. Greenberg wrote:
>Thanks to Bob Arning for the list of patent numbers.  The claims can
>be viewed at:
>
>  	http://www.viewpatent.com/?5155805
>
>	http://www.viewpatent.com/?5159668
>
>	http://www.viewpatent.com/?5325479
>
>These patents are highly focused on hinting, acknowledging
>outline-based glyph generation to be prior art.  The third patent
>appears (can't tell anything without viewing prosecution history) to
>be quite broader, at least when I started thinking about obvious ways
>to engineer around the first, primarily in adding some references, as
>well as removing the "angle" limitations.
>
>I'd be really interested to know more about the foreign references.
>
>I'd be interested in seeing or knowing more about the specific prior
>art references Alan has in mind concerning hinting technology.
>
>Not legal advice, etc.