[Trisquel-devel] Would enabling bytecode interpreter in Freetype cause patents problems or break in some way Trisquel policies?

[Flop Flop]

I enclose here a copy of a question posted in the forum sometime ago concerning Freetype in which I am particularly interested -it was posted under a different issue, so just in case it went unnoticed-. I have read about
Apple/Microsoft patents which prevent Freetype from using the "bytecode
interpreter" in order to render truetype fonts. As it is stated on
freetype web, it is still possible to use this technology on countries
where these patents do not apply. I wonder whether Trisquel (and/or
Ubuntu) uses it -I think they do not - and whether it might provide some font rendering
improvement over the "auto-hinting" process provided by the default
freetype compilation (I think that particularly on lower resolution TFT screens it might). Apparently it is possible to activate this bytecode interpreter
at compilation time -as freetype author states distributions such as
Fedora has deactivated it by default to avoid patent issues-. There is
a discussion of this issue here http://freetype.org/patents.html and also here http://david.freetype.org/cleartype-patents.html.
I have no idea about how to modify the appropriate line in the code of
freetype libraries -or whatever is implied-, so if there is any chance
to have either the instructions to do it or have an alternative package
for testing with the bytecode interpreter activated I would be willing
to try and/or test it and report results. Thanks.


      
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