Quote:
Originally Posted by delphin
You are right about font conversions erasing the hinting.
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As you probably know, like a lot of other portable readers, the underlying operating system in the Sony eReaders is Linux.
Linux based systems typically use a font rendering engine named Freetype, and sure enough, if you check the User Guide for your Sony, you will find an acknowledgement that it uses Freetype.
Because of software patent issues, until 2010, the Freetype rendering engine code was not even legally supposed to use the font's embedded hinting, so to keep things legal, the developers created a very sophisticated auto-hint generator that generates its own hints directly from the font's outlines without using it's embedded hinting.
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I personally am not using Sony reader at the moment.
I have just observed that the same font acquired from another channel (or converted with FontForge) renders sometimes VERY differently on my reading device. For that reason I think that my reader might be using hinting info.
You can do a very simple experiment yourself.
Take a well hinted font (one of Microsoft base fonts) strip the hinting and compare rendering.
As for software patents, those shouldn't be allowed. I personally put [software] patent trolls in the same category with racketeering gangsters.