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Hinting is Dead
The typophiles discuss the demise of hinting in fonts. Type designers can rejoice, because they can now concentrate on the artistic job of designing curves and white spaces. They should not have to deal with engineering tasks such as hinting. That task should be left to the font rendering software. The process should be automated at that level. Some passages from that discussion: - The Wikipedia: Increasing resolutions and new approaches to screen rendering have reduced the requirement of extensive TrueType hinting. Apples rendering approach on Mac OS X ignores almost all the hints in a TrueType font, while Microsoft's ClearType ignores many hints, and according to Microsoft, works best with lightly hinted fonts.
- Theunis de Jong: Hinting for low screen resolution will always be necessary. However, it seems that the process of finding out what to hint is moving towards the type renderer, rather than the designer (as seen in, for example, FreeType). I can think of various good reasons for this. A system-local hinting engine can consider local hardware issues such as resolution and pixel representation up to the order of RGB pixels on an LCD screen. I seem to remember FreeTypes hinting works on both horizontally and vertically aligned LCD RGB pixels, where ClearType is focused onto horizontal alignment only. Theres no way all this (excluding!) hinting can be built into every font. Another good reason is consistency: some fonts are very well hinted, others not at all. Using the type render engine to calculate hints means every font gets an equal chance to look good. (Or bad.) A final reason is, the two main hint types of TrueType and Type 1 are mutually exclusive. The designer has to pick one. FreeType can work directly with the raw curves.
- Bill Troop: If you go back to 1989, everyone was still thinking in terms of basic type libraries of only a very few hundred fonts. Even so, the TT developers claim they would have parity with the Adobe library in a year proved delusory, and let's not forget the whole thing came about because Adobe was charging exorbitant licensing fees. In those days, when nobody thought of tens of thousands of fonts, it was tenable for Apple and MS to think of putting the hinting burden primarily on the font, rather than the rasterizer. But Adobes philosophy, to put the burden on the rasterizer rather than the font, was always, one hoped, going to win out in the end otherwise independent type designers would go mad. It looks like TT is embracing this, thanks to better and better anti-aliasing. Nevertheless, even in ClearType, a tiny wrong instruction can wreak havoc, as shown by the error in Constantia revealed in a thread here some time ago. What its looking like is that rasterizers are going to be doing a better and better job, but that hand-hinting will always offer opportunities for the best possible output unfortunately, of course, such hinting is always tied to a particular rasterizer. Could there ever be universal rasterizer?
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