Font rendering, 2015

[Matthew Miller]

Okay, so, here we go again with this... well, actually, hoping *not*
to, but one specific thing keeps coming up. As far as I know,
the patents affecting freetype expired, and the "freetype-freeworld"
package from third party repositories no longer has any special sauce.
Yet, I still see people swearing up and down that this makes a big
difference, it's included in "making fonts in Fedora look good" guides
everywhere — even though that patent expiration was now long ago. And I
see that in RPMFusion, the "freetype-freeworld" package still exists
and is regularly updated.

So, what's going on with this? My uneducated guess is that the
"freeworld" package simply enables autohinting that we have off by
default and does not contain any magic sauce. Is this correct?

(On the other hand "Infinality" is a set of patches to Freetype, and
appears specifically tuned for various sets of non-free fonts.)

-- 
Matthew Miller
<mattdm at fedoraproject.org>
Fedora Project Leader