Is Subpixel Rendering avaliable now?

[shaodan1997]

Hi,

The Subpixel Rendering support was removed from FreeType2 in openSUSE due to the patents reason. And the documentation of Leap mentions that these patents would expire at the end of 2019.

I am recently interested in font configuration, so I would like to confirm if Subpixel Rendering is avaliable now in Tumbleweed. Since it's 2020, those patents should have been expired, but I am not sure if openSUSE has compiled them in.

I am not seeing anything about it in the revision log of package libfreetype6, and since the notification of patents still exist in the documentation of Leap 15.2 (which released several months ago), I wonder if there are still certain restrictions.

There does has an option of Subpixel Rendering in yast2-font, but I am not sure if it's the full version of Subpixel Rendering...

[OrsoBruno]

I am not sure about what you mean by "full version of subpixel rendering" but apparently we have some sort of subpixel rendering with libfreetype6 version 2.10.
See this related bug report https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1172022

[shaodan1997]

I am not sure about what you mean by "full version of sublpixel rendering" but apparently we have some sort of subpixel rendering with libfreetype6 version 2.10.
See this related bug report https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1172022

What I mean "full version of subpixel rendering" is that the subpixel rendering provided by upstream FreeType, I am not sure if openSUSE has enable all of the subpixel rendering or still has some limitation.

According to the bug you pasted and https://freetype.org/patents.html, it seems that there are still some "Microsoft patents" may prevent openSUSE from using the full version of sublpixel rendering, but I am not sure about it.

Anyway thanks for your clarification.