Article 128182 of comp.fonts: Newsgroups: comp.fonts Subject: Re: Truetype vs Type 1 hinting From: Richard J Kinch Date: Fri, 23 Aug 2002 16:57:12 GMT Apostrophe (') writes: > How in the world > did we end up in such a mess when it comes to hinting? The ugliness is due in my estimation mostly to competing commercial interests (natural monopolies of single open computing standards versus profit potential of fragmented proprietary standards). Type 1 hinting is ad hoc, primitive, effective, and appropriate for the mid-80s technology it was designed for. TrueType hinting was partly an admirable attempt to generalize hinting and thus improve it over Type 1, but in practice it is so clumsy as to make it generally unusable. TrueType internals also have a heavy Macintosh flavor, which seems to inhibit any joy for those like me who find that distasteful. TrueType authoring tools seem all to be visual tools for artistic minds rather than programming tools for analytic minds. If you want to craft one font as your neurotic life's work, via the agony of endless twiddling of every glyph by hand, then that's OK, but if you have hundreds of fonts to manipulate that is not the right approach. There was an effort called Display PostScript that could have been the marking model (what the Windows GDI is) for Windows, and this would have used Type 1 instead of TrueType for fonts. ATM is a kind of retrofit and compromise partly toward that end. Type 1 vs TrueType hinting is like folk guitar versus classical violin. The former is relatively easy to play, rewards modest skills, yet has limited creative range. The latter is hard to play, sounds good only with a rather rare expert effort, yet has infinite creative possibilities.