Freetype Lands In... Microsoft Office? 212
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."
Re:Truetype is Apple's technology (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, MS got access to it the same way any Mac developer does - by linking to /usr/X11/lib/libfreetype.dylib.
Seriously Slashdot, what's next - OMG Microsoft is using GCC to compile Office for Mac!
(Oh, the irony... the captcha for this post was "obvious")
Re:How Do You Figure? (Score:4, Interesting)
No, the FreeType guys should be proud. The original Mac TrueType team should be a bit steamed. Presumably there was some Mac TrueType team that just had all their hard work tossed out. Another poster pointed out that there may not be a TrueType implementation in house at Microsoft that works on the Mac.
If there isn't a Microsoft TrueType for Mac team then no harm no foul.
Bail out. (Score:2, Interesting)
What actually happened (Score:2, Interesting)
"shall we port truetype to mac, or let the idiots have crappy looking fonts?", "hmmn, i cant really be arsed porting truetype to a crap operating system", "hey, guys, check this out, someone has already done the hard work, and its free source too. that means our product will look good, mac users wont feel left out and we can all look cool and get some free publicity by using free software"...
Re:Am I missing something? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Hold Me, I'm Scared (Score:5, Interesting)
IIRC, FreeType with all the hinting turned on looks more like ClearType than Apple's renderer, and positioning is pixel perfect relative to ClearType - therefore, it's actually to make Mac Office look MORE like Windows Office, not less.
Re:Must burn. (Score:5, Interesting)
A more interesting question to ask is what portions of Freetype are they using and to what purpose. Rendering? Why not use Apple's native rendering engine? People have argued for years over the advantages and disadvantages of Apple's rendering tech relative to MS. MS has traditionally favored visual sharpness at the cost of precise positioning of the characters relative to each other. The cost of that is that at a detailed level, what you see on the screen may not accurately reflect what will be printed. Apple has gone the other way. The characters may look a bit fuzzier, but the positions are proper (again, at a very detailed level) relative to where they should be.
At least for some Windows applications over the years, the position inaccuracies have caused trouble when it comes to printing. Some word processing programs will (infrequently) get different line-filling results depending on whether they are writing to the display or to a printer. In the worst case, this causes a paragraph to be either one line longer or shorter in the printed document. Depending on how the app handles image placement, the results can be... interesting, as stuff gets pushed onto different pages in different ways.
Re:Must burn. (Score:3, Interesting)
Not any more. During the big E&D shakeup earlier this year (during which Robbie Bach, the leader of E&D, left the company), the MacBU was moved into the greater Office group [macnn.com].
They do, however, continue to operate as a separate and semi-autonomous group therein.
Re:Am I missing something? (Score:3, Interesting)
Microsoft and Apple marketing tell you that their proprietary software is supposedly superior, and Microsoft marketing tells you that using open source software contaminates your software. Obviously, if both Apple and Microsoft use FreeType for key products, in preference to software that they would only have to port, that shows that their marketing is lying. This may not be news to nerds, but it is certainly a good argument to use when negotiating the use of FOSS with management.
Re:Must burn. (Score:4, Interesting)
The Mac office team is small, light, and fast. There was a time in the XP days when Office on the Mac was considered better than Office on Windows. It gets certain features later than the windows version, if ever. But the core feels faster, more responsive, and less buggy. I'd take Office on the Mac any day over Office on Windows.
Re:TrueType in Mac OS 7 (Score:3, Interesting)
Cleartype fonts in Freetype, like the new fonts that appeared with Windows Vista, look nothing like they do in Windows. I have treid every configuration of Freetype using any combination of bytecode, slight/medium/strong autohinter, the "unpatented" subpixel renderer, and antialias. Try it yourself. You'll need an understanding of the Fontconfig library to try it out.
Have you tried applying hint transformations only to the Y coordinate? That'd simulate what GDI ClearType does, which (as I recall) involves hinting the outlines for 864x96 dpi (a factor of 9 across), rendering as monochrome, convolving the result horizontally with a 9-tap box filter, decimating by 3 horizontally, and finally drawing that with subpixels.