[ft] Patent issues

[Andrew Magill]

  I've been tasked with improving the quality of the text in our
product.  I've found a few mistakes in our code, but I'm tempted to
recommend we switch from no hinting to the unpatented native hinter.
The autohinter has been previously rejected because it produces
distractingly inconsistent character heights below 18px tall (but only
with even pixel heights?).
  We're not going to get a license from Apple, and of course we have to
comply with the patents..  but I just can't reproduce any problems like
in the picture on the web site's patents page.  I've tried Arial from my
Vista machine and from an XP machine, as well as a dozen other fonts,
scaled them up and down, and they all look great with the native
hinter.. just as Windows rasterizes them.
FT_Face_CheckTrueTypePatents() returns true for all of them, though.
  I've done my best to make sure the expected hinter is being used.  No
hinting, the autohinter and native hinting in my test program produce
distinctly different results; none is predictably blurry, the autohinter
seems to try and keep one edge of every orthogonal line sharp and
anti-aliases the other, and with native hints (with Arial, at least)
every edge is always perfectly sharp (smooth scaling of line weight be
damned).
  So why does the unpatented native hinter look so much better for me
than the web site says it should?  Are there specific situations I'm
missing that reproduce the rendering artifacts?
  Just to confirm, using the binaries from sourceforge, it is impossible
to activate the patented hinter at runtime, right?  I'd have to alter
ftoption.h and recompile in order to violate the patents.

  -Andrew