Bob --
It's likely that that FreeType is fine. (Andrew is more cautious ...) I was at Apple when the TrueType stuff was done and I don't recall them doing anything that wasn't in prior art in the 70s (the outline font idea was first done by Patrick Baudelaire at PARC, Dick Shoup and I (and Negroponte's group at MIT) did various early version of antialiased fonts and came up with algorithms for same, Warnock at E&S and then PARC experimented with outline font conversion, hinting, etc., Knuth did many wonderful things in his pursuit of computer generated fonts, etc.). All of these are on record. It's the patent office that is to blame for much of this, in that they have been willing to grant patents on just about anything for the last 30 or so years without vetting them, but simply leaving it up to unsophisticated people in civil courts (or out of court) to resolve issues. This has been/is terrible and needs to be combatted.
Cheers,
Alan
At 11:13 AM -0800 12/9/99, Bob Arning wrote:
On Thu, 09 Dec 1999 12:56:58 +0100 Henrik Gedenryd Henrik.Gedenryd@lucs.lu.se wrote:
And I don't think releasing your own code could ever get you into trouble, could it? As long as everyone dl'ed the FreeType code themselves. Of course, there might be a problem if you needed to modify the FT code, but I was thinking you would only need to write an interface to it.
What can you code do?
And do you know if FT, when it has applied hinting to an outline, can deliver the results to Squeak in the form of outlines or a pixmap?
Henrik,
The interface I wrote uses FreeType to generate pixmaps (that may be the only option, though I don't recall for sure). The pixmaps (anti-aliased) are then converted to 8-bit deep forms for display using the normal squeak StrikeFont routines.
It may well be that the patent issues referred to by the FreeType web page will be resolved someday in an acceptable way, but until then, it's just a bit too spooky.
Cheers, Bob