Typophile

The Hinting of X; Part I

David Berlow

Speak softly in an unintelligible language and carry a big illustration, as my granddaddy used to say.

H's-1.png, is a single font with a single set of instructions being rasterized 3 different ways, aliased, greyscale and Cleartype (CT), in VTT.

H's-2.png, the same, but I commented out the IUP instruction that smooths out the untouched points.

H's-3.png the left is CT with the x hints turned on, while the right is CT again, but has the x hints commented out entirely.

What’s the difference you might ask, between CT with and without x instructions. . .

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H's-1.png34.32 KB
H's-2.png32.15 KB
H's-3.png20.6 KB
Hrant H Papazian

{To Follow}

Theunis de Jong

If you check the exact RGB colors in that last image, are they exactly the same? It could be the difference is too small to see.

(Then again, the difference is not so small if you expected one of the two to look like one of the Pure Grayscale versions.)

Chris Lozos

The color halo effect always bothers me, I don't know why.

Frode Bo Helland

I’m not familiar with VTT, but if you hint the x-direction in Fontlab (perhaps since it only operates with full pixels) you’re putting serious constraints on the Cleartype rendering, not to mention adding a lot of weight to the file size. Cleartype can use the subpixels, but won’t if you lock the stem edge to pixel edge and hint its width to a rounded # of pixels. In effect: huge uncomfortable jumps from one to two to three pixel stems, whereas with only y-direction hinting the weight gain is more fluid.

Captured from web.archive.org on 20 Jul 2014. view this capture