Talk:Font hinting

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What is hinting?[edit]

This piece doesn't clearly say what hinting is, only what it does and why it is used. 203.33.3.12 00:12, 16 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I edited the article so that it's a little more clear what hinting is. The links to Microsoft's typography pages provide helpful visuals, but since they aren't free, I haven't included them. —Down10 ^TACO 02:32, 7 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Comment[edit]

Human Readers? As opposed to......? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.0.207.3 (talk) 11:39, 11 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

OCR and other machine reading algorithms. Svyatoslav (talk) 04:56, 8 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

PostScript[edit]

The article doesn't mention PostScript fonts, but talks as if font hinting is a feature only found in TrueType fonts. AFAIK this is wrong.--Oneiros (talk) 17:00, 29 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Oo, very wrong. —Tamfang (talk) 03:25, 17 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Antialiasing[edit]

I think the example illustration would be much clearer if it weren't also antialiased. i.e. show non-antialiased/non-hinted vs non-antialiased/hinted. It's also worth going through the 4 permutations (on a small display):

non-antialiased, non-hinted → usually horrible, looks "spidery" (except for bitmap fonts at native resolution)
antialiased, non-hinted → marginal improvement on antialiased/non-hinted.
non-antialiased, hinted → very sharp and clear, but unfaithful to the glyph outlines. Some people (including myself) find this most readable.
antialiased, hinted → clear and smooth. Most people prefer this look, but some find it makes the fonts look blurry and hard to focus on, resulting in eye-strain.
subpixel-rendering increases smoothness (making hinting less necessary), but adds colour-fringing, which some viewers dislike.

— Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.194.171.29 (talk) 23:09, 25 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Yes exactly. As the previous section also says, this article seems to only consider TrueType hinting without antialiasing. The situation is confused by the articles Subpixel rendering and especially Font rasterization. Shreevatsa (talk) 05:48, 15 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]