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Taking the Hint
The technology is willing but
the flesh is weak BY MATTHEW BUTTERICK
I USED TO MAKE MONEY HINTING FONTS. It really wasn't bad work. hinted PostScript fonts for years. There are suc
Nobody really understood it, so they left me alone to do my job, and
when I was finished, they rarely complained. After all, it was done.
but unfortunately, they work about as well as
kern algorithms: okay for government work,
won't impress anyone who can tell good from
HHHHHHHHHHHHHHH HHHHHH H H H
Like kerning, quality hinting only comes from
I was paid a decent rate in accordance with any skilled laborer who erate human effort.
shares his trade with a national population of practitioners which
could fit into a single Boston subway car. With room left over for hinting if there were decent tools for creating
'MENNEN( Emma editing hinted font
the Red Sox.
4 --... r,--- - - -,...,.mr-ws most of the existing
Type design may be an arcane vocation, but hinting is
downright cultish. Hinting involves using a computer
coding language to describe the relationships between the
visual features of an outline typeface in order to preserve
these features when the typeface is rasterized in pixels.
h tools,
autobut
they
bad.
delib-
And this, in turn, might not be insurmour
for the few remaining souls who felt the need t
1.111
MO
MM.
BM
ME
.
are years old, bugg ∎
and require you to
■■
■■
over and over again
only one colleague
cared about screen
enough to get to this
A computer rasterizes a typeface by scaling its fully hinted: look at them at a van-
and after her first le
outline to the appropriate point size, lays it over a
pixel grid, and then turns on the pixels that fall
ety of small screen sizes and note
how clean the letterforms are, all
in the TrueType hin
MIMEO guage, she was cure
within the outline. The problem is that as the grid without the benefit of bitmap fonts.
(Above)
any lingering desire
gets coarser, it's less likely that a given outline will
hit the pixels that best define the shape of the letter
(or any pixels at all), as in the
example to the right.
This capital H isn't hitting 'MEr
the right pixels to look like a capi- T 1
tal H. However, with hinting,
I
you can tell the scan converter (a
I
tool the computer uses to deter- I-
There are a few hitches though. Both PostScript
and TrueType have a facility for hinting, but Postriamma.
51 Script hinting doesn't allow
nearly the amount of control of
TrueType, which has a whole
language written for the purpose.
If you're serious about
hinting that works at screen
resolutions, TrueType is the
This is an example of her own fonts.
a hinted H.
So, can you sen
your fonts to be hinted and will they look bate
Sure, just as I suppose my cooking would taste
if I raised my own livestock. The truth is, the b
that hinting adds to your typeface is getting sty
and smaller; and if this is the first time you're n
about it, it might as well be the last. PostScript
ing ends up being more than adequate for mos
mine which pixels to turn on)
that the horizontal and vertical
stems are more important and
ought to sit on the grid lines,
and that the serifs are less impor- t ■
MIN
MIN
INN
MIL
only game worth playing. But
how many TrueType fonts did
you buy this year? You see the
problem. Type manufacturers
have not exactly been rushing
For hardcore screen use, it's still no big deal to
up a couple of bitmaps to accompany your out
And with screen rasterizers ever-improving (Pi
ing this text with the benefit of greyscale type f
vided by ATM 4.o) the practical benefit of hini
tant and can collapse.
to support a feature of a format fast fades away.
So what's the advantage of hinting over bitmaps? (Above)
they never liked in the first place. Well, now you know why I design Web sit
Hinting is resolution-independent: it describes a set This is an example It's no coincidence that the com- instead. Oh yeah, there's something with prove
of relationships among letter features that are true
regardless of type size. Consequently, with some wellplaced
hints, you can get bitmap-quality letterforms
at all screen sizes.
of an unhinted H.
(Below)
An example of a
run of unhinted H's,
versus hinted H's.
pany that publishes the most
TrueType faces (Microsoft) is the
last great proponent of hinting.
That wouldn't be so bad if
staying power!
It's a great idea. And usually it works pretty well. there were tools for automatically hinting fonts in
All of the core fonts on Windows and the Mac OS are TrueType—after all, Fontographer has automatically
R.RHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHEIHEIH
■■ friendly bits of coda
table
o learn
and
. Sadly,
tools
slow,
write
like
"MIRP[m> RGr], 2 18 "
. I had
who
type
s stage,
sson
ting land
of
to hint
d out
r?
better
enefit
caller
ading
hintt
fonts.
whip
line.
-n writroting
es
n
Matthew Butterick is president and creative director
of Atomic Vision, a Web development firm based
in San Francisco. Earlier Butterick worked for several
years as a graphic and type designer. During this time
he designed and engineered typefaces for companies
from Apple to Microsoft to Ziff:Davis, as well as releasing
several successful original designs, such as Wessex
and Hermes.
HEADUNE/CAPTIONS/BYLINE: ITC FRANKLIN GOTHIC DEMI, DEMI COMPRESSED, HEAVY TEXT/B10/CREDFT: RC GALLIARD ROMAN, RAM
116
Illustrations courtesy of Font Bureau