MacType for Windows

[JJ]

[quote]
Better font rendering for Windows.
[/quote]

That's all.

https://github.com/snowie2000/mactype

Annoying isn't when a software provides so little or even no useful enough
information.

To descriibe further, it bypasses Windows' built-in vector based (e.g.
TrueType [TTF], OpenType [OTF], TrueType/OpenType Collection [TTC], and
PostScript [PFB+PFM]) font rendering engine with a more accurate, more
capable, as well as more customizable engine.

With it, font appearance on softwares (which don't use their own font
rendering engine) would look more like what's displayed by open source web
browsers such as Chromium and Firefox, as well as open source operating
systems such as Linux and BSD.

What's most useful is the fact that the font rendering used by MacType
supports color emoji fonts, and it's not yet supported by Windows versions
older than Windows 8.1. This means that, it can add color emoji support to
Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Windows 8.0. While the software do support
Windows XP and 2003, its support has unfortunately been dropped, and the
previous software version which still support Windows XP, still has poor
support for color emoji (most characters are still shown as boxes).

Here's a sample screenshot in Windows 7 VM without MacType:

https://i.imgur.com/I2ukd4s.png

And here's the one with MacType (v2021.1 RC1) with "mufunyo" profile (note:
only a view profiles support color emoji):

https://i.imgur.com/lfUrVAt.png

The RTF and text document files can be found here:

RTF: https://pastebin.com/70W83ctk
Text: https://pastebin.com/V4awa304

Note: for the text format, if it's saved using the Raw or Download button,
the encoding must be manually specified as UTF-8 when opened using Notepad.

Those documents were copy-pasted from below GitHub project file, so credits
goes to that project.

https://github.com/13rac1/emojione-color-font/blob/master/full-demo.html

The font used for the above screenshots is the "Twemoji Mozilla"
(TwemojiOne.ttf) font which is bundled with Firefox, in its "fonts"
subfolder. And for Notepad, its configuration must be set to use that font
or any other font which has color emoji.

As we can see, the software is still not perfect, as it's still displays box
characters adjacent to a color emoji character, which should be just spaces.
But it's no surprise since it still an RC version. It will get better in the
future.

[John C.]

Nice one, JJ. However, I'm curious. Isn't the Microsoft font rendering
engine either one or more system files? If that's the case, then
wouldn't the substitute be quickly rendered inoperable by Windows system
protection mechanism?

--
John C. BS206. No ad, CD, commercial, cripple, demo, nag, pirated,
share, spy, time-limited, trial or web wares for me please. I filter out
posts made from Google Groups and cross-posted (sent to more than one
newsgroup at a time) messages. I recommend you do likewise.

[JJ]

On Mon, 1 Aug 2022 05:45:42 -0700, John C. wrote:
>
> Nice one, JJ. However, I'm curious. Isn't the Microsoft font rendering
> engine either one or more system files? If that's the case, then
> wouldn't the substitute be quickly rendered inoperable by Windows system
> protection mechanism?

Yes, Windows' font rendering engine is actually in the kernel file
(win32k.sys). But the software technique works by using function hooks which
involves memory patching, so no system files are (physically and
persistently) replaced. Because it's an in memory patching, the changes do
not persist across system restart, and the software needs to be run at all
time to monitor new process creations in order to hook text rendering
related functions.

The software technique is actually not something new. It's been around quite
a long time and has been used to add support for displaying
Chinese-Japanese-Korean (CJK) characters on CJK applications which are made
for CJK version of Windows, where it uses Shift-JIS (for Japanese) or Big5
(for traditional Chinese) text encoding rather than Unicode; without
changing the system's default code page setting. Such software is well known
for gamers who plays Japanese games in non-Japanese Windows.

MacType is similar, it's just that it's for Unicode encoding rather than CJK
specific encodings - as its main focus is to provide more accurate font
display, more font readability, and so on. Since it bypasses Windows built
in font rendering, it has full control of font rendering and can do whatever
it can, including adding support for color emoji for systems which don't
support it yet.

[John C.]

JJ, thanks very much for the explanation. Very clear and easy to
understand, and I appreciate it.