Ted Wright wrote:
> Marcus Denker <marcus at ira.uka.de> wrote:
> 
>>...
>>There has been another project (for an old version, 2.7 maybe) which used 
>>the FreeType Library for dealing with TrueType (with hinting), and it did 
>>do sub-pixel anti-aliasing. Quite nice:
>>
>>http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/1225 
>>
>>This should be realy be ported to 3.2
> 
> 
> Would this port be different than Hans-Martin Mosner's "TrueType for real.cs"
> posted to this list on August 25th? 
> 
> After moving method textStyle from StrikeFont to AbstractFont as he suggests in 
> another email, this has been working fairly well for me.
> 
> Ted
> 
> 
My code does not use hinting, and it does not cache glyphs which would be necessary
for serious use. I know it's rendering acceptably fast on quick machines
(thanks to Andreas Raab's slick Balloon2D engine) but there is room for improvement.
The problem with hinting is that the real TrueType hinting engine is patented,
and AFAIK there is no legal way of implementing a mechanism which interprets
these hints without infringing on the patents. (Andrew, correct me if I'm wrong)
FreeType includes auto-hinting heuristics which improve the display at small
point sizes a lot.

Cheers,
Hans-Martin