[Fontconfig] libxft2 kerning difficulty

[Keith Packard]

Around 11 o'clock on Mar 4, Dan Egnor wrote:

> Isn't that illegal, since I don't have a patent license from Apple?

If you believe the Apple patent covers the FreeType code, then it might 
well be.  That's for you to decide.

> Besides, I don't understand why this requires hinting.  I'm just trying 
> to predict the width of the actual pixels that are going to be drawn.

You can't predict that easily -- the only way to know what pixels will be 
drawn is to draw them.  The hinting will adjust the glyph shapes and the 
escapements to improve the appearance on the screen.

It is possible to compute an absolute bounding box for each glyph using 
the conrol point for the splines defining the glyph, but that may be off
by several pixels in any direction.

-keith