Hinting

Hinting is a hard term to understand, especially since the techniques used for hinting are so complex.  Basically, each of the outline fonts have a mathematical formula to describe their overall "look".  But this only gives an "overall" look to the font (i.e. the "outline").  No formula can create perfect fonts because it cannot define the small edges, widths, corners, etc - perfectly.  To create an impressive font, each character must be further refined and these areas must be touched up.  The typographer who is designing the font, will look at each glyph, and create "hints" at what needs further modification.  He may "hint" that the upper stem of an "L" is too wide, and if the hint is applied - the stem will be narrowed.

Today's professional Font design software supplies the hints for the typographer, and he can either accept or reject each hint.

Hinting provides information to the raster image processor (RIP) for rasterisation of fonts. Low resolutions or small font sizes may otherwise present the glyph (shape of character) with various distortions:

·         Stem widths are unequal

·         Line thicknesses are unequal

·         Location of features are inaccurate

The method of hinting depends on the font type. TrueType and PostScript fonts use different methods. For Type1 fonts (PostScript fotns) only hints for vertical and horizontal stems are defined. For TrueTrype a 'hinting language' allows for very detailed contol of the raster process. Modern type creation tools (Fontographer, FontLab) support both types of hinting in an intuitive way.

The result of hinting can best be seen in a series of glyphs rasterised in various sizes. The top row in the following example is without hinting, the bottom row is rasterised with hinting.

Antialiasing

Even for display on screens the hinting information became less important with the introduction of antialiased glyphs. This method adds additional shaded (not just black and white) pixels to the edges of the shapes which blurres the image. Our brain recognises a more smooth contour.

On Windows the Adobe Type Manager first alled to use antialiased glyps. With the later Windows version (starting with NT) the method was implemented into the operating system.