On 01/15/2017 03:04 PM, Stuart Henderson wrote:
Other Linux/BSD systems have this option enabled for a long time now,
under them Ubuntu, Debian [2], Freebsd [3], Arch Linux [4] and more.
There has been a privious discussion on this list on this topic [5]
where tedu@ mentions, that this issue is irrelevant once you get a
decent display with a higher DPI (or use bitmap fonts), which is of
course true [6]. But at least for me, at work we still have (and buy)
new monitors that have a DPI of 96 (e.g. Dell U2412M). On these
displays, bitmap fonts are too tiny for me and don't scale well, so
subpixel rendering with enabled lcd filter really makes a difference.
Hi Stuart, thanks for your reply.
btw it is "li...@wrant.com" not tedu writing that. good for him/her
to have a 27" high DPI display but I agree with you here.
True, i misread that. Sorry for confusing the two.
[1] https://www.freetype.org/patents.html
"A survey from June 2007 shows no less than nine patents from Microsoft
that cover ClearType."
"Does FreeType Implement Any of the Patented Techniques?
Technically, no. The patents cover the whole process of generating
and displaying sub-pixel images. Since the font engine doesn't do the
display part, it cannot infringe."
... but xenocara as a whole does display.
Indeed.
[2]
http://metadata.ftp-master.debian.org/changelogs/main/f/freetype/freetype_2.5.2-3+deb8u1_changelog
" * debian/patches-freetype/enable-subpixel-rendering.patch: enable subpixel
rendering features, used by libcairo and xft to provide LCD colour
filtering. This is considered no more or less evil than the bytecode
interpreter which we also enable."
this doesn't strike me as a robust evaluation of the patent situation.
[3] http://www.freshports.org/print/freetype2/
"The following configuration options are available for freetype2-2.6.3:
LCD_FILTERING=on: Sub-pixel rendering (patented)"
optional and a warning about patents in the description. And FreeBSD's
inclusion of CDDL code (e.g. ZFS) shows they have a different approach
to patents than OpenBSD.
[4]
https://git.archlinux.org/svntogit/packages.git/tree/trunk/0002-Enable-subpixel-rendering.patch?h=packages/freetype2
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Talk:Font_configuration - "does not
require patching FreeType and Fontconfig because Arch Linux already does
this. However, Arch Linux does not enable the patent encumbered settings
by default" - I don't really understand what arch are doing here.
With the patch that all systems use, freetype is compiled with support
for sub-pixel rendering, which is patent encumbered. Tools like
fontconfig can then use this functionality from freetype to render fonts
with subpixel rendering, but the setting is disabled by default in
fontconfig. So even if support is compiled in, it is not used by
default, and users have to create a config file.
Is there a chance to get this enabled in xenocara?
I don't think there's really been enough analysis of the patent
situation to give us the information to know whether enabling this
by default is going to get users or OpenBSD into patent-related
problems or not.
Ok, i can't really help/decide on this issue, all i could do is to show
what others are doing ;) So i guess i just recompile freetype on each
update.
Here's how you do it on -current (needs /usr/src and /usr/xenocara set
up and patched, of course):
$ cd /usr/xenocara/lib/freetype
$ doas make clean
$ doas make
$ doas make install
