Typophile

Future of Hinting

hello seb

Hey Typophiles,

Sorry if this is a silly question, but its something that's been on my mind for some time.

Does the increase and access to high-resolution screens mean that hinted web-fonts will become irrelevant in the future? I might be missing something, but since the standard print resolution is 300 dpi and products available today like the Retina screen for Mac Computers (boasting around 220 dpi), will there be any reason to hint type in, say 5 years time?

From what I understand, hinting seems to be the most laborious & code-heavy part of type design, and many type designers outsource the work to 3rd-parties, so I imagine this would be great for small foundries with tight budgets?

Seb

Hrant H Papazian

This has been discussed before (but putting it in General Discussion might help). I think hinting won't become irrelevant that soon, because modest-resolution screens will remain around for a while.

Also consider that some scripts (like Chinese - not exactly irrelevant in the future :-) rely on a lot of internal detail.

hhp

John Hudson

Hinting is design-specific, not only resolution-specific. So while it may make sense to say that for many type designs, particularly those for a particular set of writing systems, hinting may fairly soon become irrelevant for many significant uses, it isn't possible to make that claim about all designs, all writing systems and all uses.

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