You might want to ping Peter Lofting with these questions, especially #2 - he has the answer and hopefully he’ll be allowed to share it.

It is however interesting that hinted TrueType, an Apple invented and Apple controlled (via their patents) technology, has been largely abandoned in their recent products (Mac OSX and iPods), but continues to gain some traction over bitmap and PS fonts in the device, rich media and OSS space.

Pings away.

The be fair though, MS was also an originator of TT hinting,
and has, if not abandoned, certainly deprecated it. Unless MS
is playing the blossom-slowly cleverness with CT and we’ll end
up seeing superhinted CT one day! For example note how originally
y-direction hints were not included, but soon they will; although
the official stance seems to be that was for reasons of previously
inadequate rasterization performance.

hhp

>The be fair though, MS was also an originator of TT hinting,
and has, if not abandoned, certainly deprecated it.

There may be some truth to that with respect to the higher profile MS work, but in reality we’re still spending a lot of money on hinting, and I think all the hardcore TT hinters are being kept very busy.

Yes hinting time allowed and the money companies are willing to pay or invest has decreased. But FontLab has increased the speed of production dramatically by including a decent AutoHinter and Python support.

I learned Python in a few hours and in less than a week I wrote enough functions to make a 250 glyph font into a 650 glyph font with extended fractions, superiors, inferiors, and accents to cover up to European Ext-A. Been able to batch process glyph names and other font info to fix or rename whole families and write out a fully localized name table all within the FontLab file.

You can also hint to a similar level by using the autohinter then changing it’s hints or adding your own.

So in the long run we are hinting/creating font files that are 3 times as big as we did five years ago, hinting to the same level and doing all that for 1/2 the price in 1/3 of the time.

ClearType and the Mac OS-X fuzzies have eliminated the need for heavy hinting but there are still situations that require manually hinted TrueType.

First, here’s something from Peter:
“
TrueType and TT-CT hinting have never been used by OSX.
Everything is anti-aliased by the Quartz 2D rendering engine.
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/quartzextreme/

Older QuickDraw APIs still use hinting below the user-nominated
threshold size (usually 12pt).
“

I’ve asked him a follow-up question or two, and will report back.

BTW, this older API business makes me wonder:
Is there a not-too-inelegant way of bypassing the OSX fuzzy
rendering so a font could get its hinting kicking in again?

—

And now I have another question:
How do CT fonts render out when their hints are ignored?
Do they look like “regular” AA-ed fonts, or do they come out worse?

—

Vincent, that was a great synopsis - a keeper.

> FontLab has increased the production time dramatically

You mean decreased?

> for 1/2 the price in 1/3 of the time.

Ah, leveraging some new margin in the new system, eh? ;-)

> ClearType and the Mac OS-X fuzzies have eliminated the need for heavy hinting

You mean heavy manual hinting, right? Because I’m
wondering how that jives with “we are hinting/creating
font files that are 3 times as big”, which confused me.

hhp

For example note how originally y-direction hints were not included, but soon they will

I’m not sure I understand what you mean by this Hrant. Y-direction hints, including deltas, are supported in current CT rasterisers and, as far as I know, they always have been. This makes sense, since the sampling gain is only in the x-direction. You need y direction hints to establish consistent alignment and horizontal stroke weight.

What is new in the Vista CT rasteriser is gasp table controlled y-direction greyscale antialiasing.

OK, sorry, that one.
Or whatever makes like the “S” no longer* distractingly aliased in only the y-axis.
Where’s that comparison you once put up?

* Well, now, from 2007 (hopefully).

hhp

So I’d like a[nother] favor, if possible:

Could somebody show a screen grab of the new CT fonts (or I guess any highly CT-optimized fonts) when installed on OSX? Especially nice would be a comparison against some “native” OSX fonts. Failing that, if there’s a way to turn off (or maybe you’d have to remove) the hinting in the new CT fonts and show how they come out on Windows that would be good too.

Please? Pretty please with pixels on it?

hhp