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 FreeType’s hinting works on both horizontally and vertically aligned LCD RGB pixels, where ClearType is focused onto horizontal alignment only. There’s 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’.

(Note to everyone: this is all typed without resorting to manuals, web pages, and logn term memory storage. Feel free to argue.)

Note the use of the word extensive in the Wikipedia entry. Hinting is still being done, but thanks to better rendering and autohinters there’s (relatively) little need for the extensive manual hinting that was common in the recent past.

I didn’t check the actual wiki page, but I suspect

Increasingly, new approaches to

and

ignores almost all the hints

and

ClearType ignores many hints

are tagged with “vaguerism” tags.

>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).

That’s where we want to be.

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 Adobe’s 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 it’s 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?

Every now and then, it’s just better to edit the wiki.

David, the most recent changes in the Wikipedia article only amount to this:

’Increasing resolutions and new approaches to screen rendering have reduced the requirement of extensive TrueType hinting. Apple’s 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.’

Have you had a go or are you planning to ?

“Have you had a go or are you planning to ?”
the top of the thread is the old one, the wiki now is the new one.

Cheers!