Harfbuzz, Graphite and dollar exchange rates

Harfbuzz is the unified text layout engine for Linux (both Qt and Pango-Gnome). Graphite is another text layout engine. What’s the difference? Graphite behaves somewhat like AAT – the same technology that powers Apple’s beautiful fonts in OSX. It is what is called a smart font engine. Problems occur in most East Asian languages because [...]

nVidia, ATI start your engines – Rage is here

Rage, John Carmack’s latest baby – which has spawned countless papers at SIGGRAPHs and new fangled datastructures (sparse voxel octree – I’m looking at you) is almost here and the demos are looking to be amazing. . I’ve seen no game that, in this realistic style, looks so good and has a landscape so rich [...]

Google’s video endgame: On2 acquisition

Google announced that it would be acquiring On2 Technologies for 106 million USD. On2 owns the licenses for the VP8 video codec – the same technology which powers Flash video at its core. Why this is interesting is because of the ongoing dispute between Apple, Google and the Mozilla foundation. Without going into the long [...]