Re: TT patents once more

[Aslak Raanes]

Bertrand Petit:

> Just van Rossum:
> 
> > And, dear FT developers, if there's anything else the community can do
> > to help you win your case, let's hear it!
> 
>       Juste have a look at Knuth's Digital Typography. From what I read
> there, the patents are void as they are about something published many
> years before the pattent submition. Knuth may be a good advocate to this
> cause.

Donald Knuth talks about TrueType in
<URL:http://www.advogato.org/article/28.html>. 

<quote>
There's a fairly major controversy with TrueType right now, that there a
number of patents that are owned now by Apple. It's kind of interesting
to me that that is the case even though it's for the most part
derivative work of what was in Metafont. 


I've been very unhappy with the way patents are handled. But the more I
look at it, the more I decide that it's a waste of time. I mean, my life
is too short to fight with that, so I've just been staying away. But I
know that the ideas for rendering... The main thing is that TrueType
uses only quadratic splines, and that Type1 fonts use cubic splines,
which allow you to get by with a lot fewer points where you have to
specify things. 

[...]

</quote>



-- 
Aslak Raanes
<URL:http://pobox.com/%7easlakr/>