Re:The new TrueType interpreter in FreeType 2.7.0
by JoshTriplett on Sunday July 17, 2016 @09:31PM
(#12112783)
> Personally I have never understood the whole font hinting thing. It seems rather unscientific and the result is that fonts look fundamentally different at slight size differences; seems hinting is part of the problem, not the solution.
Hinting exists because displays don't have infinite resolution. Mac-style rendering has always acted like displays have paper-like resolutions, and respects a font's letter shapes more, favoring the original designer's intended font appearance on paper. Windows-style rendering has always acknowledged that displays have pixels, and that smearing fonts across pixels can decrease readability on average-DPI displays. Linux font rendering has historically offered a choice between the two, but typically defaulted to Windows-style rendering.
Yes, and in my case on Linux I switched off hinting a long time ago (but retained anti-aliasing)
We even did it on our network at work by default as users liked the fonts when they were more "Mac like".
Personally I have never understood the whole font hinting thing. It seems rather unscientific and the result is that fonts look fundamentally different at slight size differences; seems hinting is part of the problem, not the solution.