Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

David C Brown

Mikhail V Leonov

John Carlton Platt

Gregory Carl Hitchcock

Jerry Jay Dunietz

Michael J Duggan

Beat Stamm

Michael M Byrd

Oliver H Foehr

Worachai Chaoweeraprasit

Zhanjia Yang

Bodin Dresevic

Andrey Shur

Greg D Schechter

Michael John Hillberg

David Ornstein

Joseph Ternasky

Daniel Emerson

Sriram Subramanian

Hock San Lee

Robert A Relyea

Ikko Fushiki

Mikhail Lyapunov

Wei Zhu

Tarek Mahmoud Sayed

Zhenbin Xu

Jean-Marie H Larcheveque

Nathan W Everett

Joe King

Young Gah Kim

Seema L Ramchandani

Simon J Daniels

Warachai Chaoweeraprasit

Various technologies and techniques are disclosed for improving output rendering in anti-aliased rendering scenarios. The system receives information regarding at least one visual element area which is important for symmetric appearance. The information can include at least one coordinate of a guideline that a client would like to be snapped towards a pixel grid. The system uses the information to perform a pixel snapping procedure to snap the points of visual element to a pixel grid to create an adjusted image. The adjusted image is rendered on a display device in an anti-aliased rendering scenario. APIs are provided for setting horizontal and vertical pixel snapping guidelines. The collections containing the snapping guidelines are accessed and used during the pixel snapping procedure.

Pixel snapping for anti-aliased rendering

Described is a system and method by which text elements to be rendered on a computer display (e.g., paragraph, line or any subset of text including a character or glyph) may be individually or collectively animated, at an author-selected level of granularity. Animation of text may be specified by setting animation properties via direct coding (e.g., in markup) or by specifying animation code to execute on text-related data, just prior to rendering. The text to animate may be static, or dynamically obtained at runtime from an external source. The text to animate is maintained as a whole with other text of the same element, in a text object, until a processing level that produces separate glyph runs, with an animation transform associated with each glyph run to be animated. Also described is an API that supports text animation.

Exposing various levels of text granularity for animation and other effects

Modular content framework and document format methods and systems are described. The described framework and format define a set of building blocks for composing, packaging, distributing, and rendering document-centered content. These building blocks define a platform-independent framework for document formats that enable software and hardware systems to generate, exchange, and display documents reliably and consistently. The framework and format have been designed in a flexible and extensible fashion. In addition to this general framework and format, a particular format, known as the reach package format, is defined using the general framework. The reach package format is a format for storing paginated documents. The contents of a reach package can be displayed or printed with full fidelity among devices and applications in a wide range of environments and across a wide range of scenarios.

Document mark up methods and systems

Methods and systems permit rendering a text element formatted using unavailable or restricted fonts. In one embodiment, when producing a document that contains a restricted font, text portions formatted with the restricted font are processed into an alternate representation. A textual representation for the text portions and the additional representation(s) are embedded in a document or container. A unique representation for the restricted font file allows a consuming computing system to attempt to find the restricted font locally. Each textual representation is rendered using its corresponding restricted font, if the restricted font file is found. Otherwise, the additional representation(s) are used.

Methods for providing an accurate visual rendition of a text element formatted with an unavailable font

Described is a system and method by which a unique and permanent identifier is added to tags in hierarchically-arranged data (e.g., an XML or XAML file) by a first tool. The data with the unique and permanent identifiers is processed by a second tool into a flat file of key-value pairs, with the key being constructed from the identifier and attribute names, and the value comprising the corresponding value for that attribute. When the flat file from the new data file is compared to a flat file from an earlier version of the file, a standard merge program is able to better detect the differences, including differences caused by complex edits. The comparison is more granular than it would be if simply comparing the hierarchically-arranged file versions, thereby providing significant benefits in localization and other version tracking scenarios.

Using permanent identifiers in documents for change management

A system and method automatically determines appropriate font characteristics for different display mediums and different readability parameters in any language. A method includes determining font characteristics by receiving data including a font identifier and a language identifier, producing a representative line of type in the identified language and with the identified font, measuring characteristics of the representative line of type, and normalizing the measurements across a plurality of fonts and a plurality of languages. In an embodiment, an international translator is used to receive the data including the font identifier and the language identifier and the received data can include text in a language. The normalizing refers to widths of portions of the text called a 'black river,' which is used to identify plotted measured characteristics to determine an average grayness across a perpendicular to a reading direction. The average grayness enables comparisons to pluralities of fonts and languages.

International font measurement system and method

Methods for filtering a file written in Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML) and incrementally returning the logical content contained therein to the environment, e.g., a search engine, are provided. Additionally provided are methods for extracting logical content contained in a XAML file to facilitate searching and/or indexing thereof. The methods provided permit the filtering of files containing only flow-format elements, files containing only elements representing fixed-format pages, and/or files containing both flow-format and elements representing fixed-format pages.

Methods and systems for filtering an Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML) file to facilitate indexing of the logical content contained therein

The invention is generally directed to a method for selecting a font that uses a mark-up language document to group together multiple pre-existing fonts into a single font family or 'virtual font.' The mark-up language document includes rules regarding the conditions under which individual fonts within the family are to be used. This permits, for example, a font developer to create, in an efficient manner, an international font using several preexisting fonts.

Method for selecting a font

Methods and systems for selecting different anti-aliasing filters to be applied to objects of image data rendered with pixel sub-component precision based on the attributes of the objects of the graphics image. For example, when rendering a character traditional anti-aliasing applied in the direction parallel to the striping of the pixel sub-components is adapted to the unique requirements of different character font sizes such that a large amount of anti-aliasing is applied to large font sizes while a small amount of anti-aliasing is provided for characters at small font sizes. Displaced sampling is utilized to determine the alpha values for a plurality of vertical samples for each RGB pixel sub-component. The selected anti-aliasing filter is applied to the alpha values to determine the luminous intensity values of the RGB pixel sub-components.

Type size dependent anti-aliasing in sub-pixel precision rendering systems

Disclosed is a central cache that is updated without the overhead of locking. Updates are 'atomic' in that they cannot be interrupted part way through. Applications are always free to read data in the cache, accessing the data through a reference table. Applications do not directly update the cache, instead, they send update requests to a service routine. To update the cache, the service routine proceeds in two phases. In the first phase, the service routine prepares the new data and adds them to the cache, without updating the reference table. During the first phase, an application accessing the cache cannot 'see' the new data because the reference table has not yet been updated. After the first phase is complete, the service routine performs the second phase of the update process: atomically updating the reference table. The two-phase update process leaves the cache, at all times, in a consistent state.

Method and system for an atomically updated, central cache memory

A system and method is described for manipulating text relative to a curved reference line in order to transform a character, rendered in a particular font, to generate a warped character with the degree of warping reflecting the local curvature of the curved reference line. The curvature of the reference line is reflected in the nature of quadilaterals, i.e., quads, generated for a corresponding rectangle on a straight reference line. The coordinates of the corners of the quad provide the parameters to carry out the transformation. Such rendering improves the appearance of the text and provides a method that modifies available fonts in a flexible fashion without the need to generate new fonts.

Warping text along a curved path

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Redmond, WA, United States of America

David C Brown