Freetype Lands In... Microsoft Office? 212
Posted
by
CmdrTaco
from the share-well-everyone dept.
from the share-well-everyone dept.
phy_si_kal writes "Now Microsoft must love free software. Indeed, Office 2011 for Mac (beta 5 at least) uses Freetype! Somehow they figured out the free software 'clean room implementation' of their own (patented) TrueType technology must better suit their needs."
Truetype is Apple's technology (Score:5, Informative)
Their ``Royal'' font format.
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/truetypehistory.mspx [microsoft.com]
Microsoft got access to it by trading to Apple their ``TrueImage'' PostScript clone (seen that used anywhere lately?)
William
Re:Am I missing something? (Score:0, Informative)
Nobody gives a shit about what you think is good. The OP is talking about the summary. Did you even read it? I know it's common around here forgo reading the articles, but the fucking summary too? It's nearly 90% troll with just 10% actual fact. I should know!
Re:Must burn. (Score:5, Informative)
From Wikipedia: "TrueType is an outline font standard originally developed by Apple Computer in the late 1980s as a competitor to Adobe's Type 1 fonts used in PostScript. TrueType has become the most common format for fonts on both the Mac OS and Microsoft Windows operating systems."
There was a story on Slashdot back in July talking about FreeType celebrating the expiration of the Apple's TrueType patent.
Patents expired (Score:5, Informative)
Go to www.truetype.org and read the section on patents.
"All patents related to the TrueType bytecode interpreter have expired since May 2010. More information regarding this topic is available at our patents page."
All patents were originally held by Apple up to May 2010.
Re:Must burn. (Score:3, Informative)
Zarf wrote:
Apple did.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TrueType [wikipedia.org]
TrueType in Mac OS 7 (Score:4, Informative)
TrueType has been in Mac OS since System 6 (as a kernel extension) and System 7 (standard). In Mac OS classic, as in Windows, the rendering engine uses a "hint" to fit the outlines to the pixel grid. These hints are stored as a bytecode program in the font that modifies the outline; the patent covers this use of bytecode. (FreeType can be configured to use these hints or, especially in jurisdictions with software patents, to create its own hints purely from the outline shapes.)
Microsoft's ClearType rendering engine stretches the outlines horizontally by a factor of 9 before applying hints, which messes up fonts that don't expect this *cough*Helvetica 14px "mnr"*cough*. But because Mac OS X uses antialiasing for all text, it ignores most hints. Perhaps Microsoft wants to make the appearance of text the same across all platforms.
Re:Must burn. (Score:4, Informative)
Well of course. The Mac ports have pretty much always been a second-class citizen to the Windows version.
Only recently. Excel originated on the Mac - 1.0 was Mac-only in 1985.
Re:Must burn. (Score:5, Informative)
TrueType is a font standard, which has largely been succeeded by OpenType. TrueType was developed by Apple and licensed by Microsoft, while OpenType was co-developed by Adobe and Microsoft.
On Windows, Microsoft has two text APIs: Uniscribe & GDI, which combine to provide text rendering and a whole lot more, and DirectWrite, which is new to Windows 7 and has much better quality, improved OpenType support, and GPU acceleration. These technologies are so baked into Windows that I'm not surprised at all that they wouldn't want to port them to OS X.
They included freetype (not linked) I think (Score:4, Informative)
If you link to that particular lib, you must be using X11. Don't link to anything X11 on OS X since it is strictly optional part of OS X install. I don't think MS would require X11 client to have their office to run.
Oh if MS woke up and adopted itself today, their "Office for UNIX" (I bet they would name linux/bsd one that way) would link to it. Of course, not a chance.
I agree to whoever you reply to, pretty ironic that Apple uses/licenses freetype too. I smiled when I saw the note on iPod touch license.
And while on it, their Mac Business unit blog is one of rare MS blogs to follow, for example they had to deal with much more strict gcc coming with XCode/Leopard while compiling MS Office. It is not a "big secret" or anything, OS X Office is truly a Mac program. I heard they experimented with the "actual MS Word on win32" port to Mac OS. Their customers went nuts. They got tricked by "Why doesn't MS Word for Mac doesn't have this?" feedback originally.
Re:Must burn. (Score:4, Informative)
If they were switching the Windows version to Freetype that would actually be a story.
Good point. I was presuming there already was a Mac version of TrueType. If there isn't one already, you are absolutely right.
Oh, there's definitely a Mac version of TrueType. Apple developed it 20 years ago [wikipedia.org] to compete with Adobe Type 1 [wikipedia.org] and licensed TrueType to Microsoft for Windows 3.1. It forced John Warnock to open Type 1 and eventually killed Adobe Type Manager [wikipedia.org]. Remember when ATM was something other than a place to get cash or something dirty?
Re:Must burn. (Score:5, Informative)
It's done in a Mac Business Unit separate from the Office team.
Re:Must burn. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Must burn. (Score:3, Informative)
Helps make the financial results for Entertainment and Devices look better. Remember that they lost truely vast sums of money on the XBox and XBox 360...
Re:How Do You Figure? (Score:3, Informative)