A tale of Freetype and Apple
Some time back I was trying to get Fvwm on my Ubuntu laptop. One of the prereqs was the open source font-rendering engine Freetype .
But no matter how hard I tried, I couldnt get the fonts to look pretty ( I even got the Open Source Liberation Fonts ).
And then I discovered about the Microsoft and Apple patents.
It seems that they own a few patents in font rendering, which meant that unless I turned them on by hand and compiled them in FreeType, these obviously superior engines would not be used for rendering.
The way to switch them on is:
in include/freetype/config/ftoption.h , uncomment lines:
/* #define TT_CONFIG_OPTION_BYTECODE_INTERPRETER */ (Apple Patent)
/* #define FT_CONFIG_OPTION_SUBPIXEL_RENDERING */ (Microsoft Patent)
Voila. Ze beautiful fonts are heerre.