Fedora 34 Planning For Better Font Rendering By Enabling HarfBuzz In FreeType

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Fedora 34 Planning For Better Font Rendering By Enabling HarfBuzz In FreeType

One of the latest planned changes to the long list of improvements for Fedora 34 is enabling the HarfBuzz support within the FreeType library...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Fedora-34-FreeType-HarfBuzz

[pkunk]

Wait what? Why it was not enabled before?

[Duve]

Wait what? Why it was not enabled before?

Actually, that is something I'd like to know myself. I would like to know what were the roadblocks before with some knowledge that typegraphy can be very, very dicey on the legal end of it... And Fedora tends to try and avoid those pitfalls when possible.

[Mez']

Any other distro already has it?

How can we check if we make use of it on our system?

[pkunk]

Pretty sure Arch has it for years. Proposal includes way to test it.

[ssokolow]

Actually, that is something I'd like to know myself. I would like to know what were the roadblocks before with some knowledge that typegraphy can be very, very dicey on the legal end of it... And Fedora tends to try and avoid those pitfalls when possible.

I vaguely remember it having to do with some TrueType software patents. (Source: Vague memories of instructions on how to compile your own builds to fix the crappy font hinting.)

[mroche]

I vaguely remember it having to do with some TrueType software patents. (Source: Vague memories of instructions on how to compile your own builds to fix the crappy font hinting.)

The known (or utilized) patents for TrueType and ClearType expired in 2010 and 2019 respectively:

https://www.freetype.org/patents.html

Cheers,
Mike

[Vistaus]

Any other distro already has it?

How can we check if we make use of it on our system?

I would like to know this as well.

[ssokolow]

The known (or utilized) patents for TrueType and ClearType expired in 2010 and 2019 respectively:

https://www.freetype.org/patents.html

Cheers,
Mike

Makes sense. I think I read what I read somewhere between 2005 and 2007.

[zxy_thf]

Actually, that is something I'd like to know myself. I would like to know what were the roadblocks before with some knowledge that typegraphy can be very, very dicey on the legal end of it... And Fedora tends to try and avoid those pitfalls when possible.

Likely due to circular dependencies. Harfbuzz also depends on FreeType