I've been thinking about subpixel antialiasing. My worries: 1. MS patent issues 2. rotation/flipping/etc.
Ad 1: There are open source projects that use subpixel antialiasing. AFAIK
they haven't been sued. But that should not be good enough, of course, for
us. If there were a patent-safe way of doing it, it would be really nice.
Okay, I'm lost with this first one. Back in the 80s, sub-pixel anti-aliasing was being done by Edsun in some (high-end) video cards. I wrote software and papers on it; it was a big move forward. This was pre-Windows and done outside of Windows. The technique has existed for decades; to a large degreee, some impressionistic paintings (those made of dots) provide evidence of "prior art".
Similarly, any resampling (e.g. bicubic or bilinear) effectively accomplishes the same thing. For example, virtually rendering the font at 2x and resampling it down.
Microsoft may have a patent on a particular /technique /of anti-aliasing, just as they may patent a particular compression algorhythm or encryption scheme, but I seriously doubt they could patent and am certain they couldn't defend a patent on antialiasing of text on a computer.
The other side of the question is, why? My IIIc only has 160x160, not nearly enough to want to blur the fonts with antialiasing, and my UX50 uses a font stolen directly, without even enlarging it, from the local microfische reader. Fortunately, FontsUX helps. Plucker appeared to work fine with FontsUX for the brief (four day) period I had all three. (The UX has been at Sony repair for well over a week now for WiFi problems.)
-TMcN-
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