Quote:
Originally Posted by GERGE
Hinting, by its very nature, is for the screens. It does interpolation of the pixels so that glyphs would seem more natural, more like print. Hinting instructions tells the renderer which pixels are to be interpolated.
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No.
Once upon a time, when looked at text, fonts looked extremely ugly. They were stair-stepped. Each pixel was either 100% foreground color or 100% background color.
Then somebody invented anti-aliasing. Anti-aliasing works this way: Pixel doesn't have to be either black or white, it can have 256 shades of grey, depending on how much of the pixel would be white and how much would be black if the font border line went through the pixel.
This works nice for letters like "S" that are all curves, but not with horizontal and vertical lines. If the letter 'I', for example, was rendered big enough, so that the stem was wide several pixels it didn't matter that the border pixels were grey. But if it was about 1 pixel wide you had to force the borders of the stem so they are located on the borders of the pixels, so instead of two pixels with 50% grey you get 1 pixel with 100% black and surrounding pixels are white. To get this, you have to round the dimensions of letters so that the borders of letters fall exactly between pixel borders.
BUT, when you start rounding you might get capital "I" where left serif is 2 pixels wide and right serif is 1 pixel wide. This is why Microsoft started using hinting. Hinting is set of rules saying how the dimensions are supposed to be rounded - so that, for example, you do not get letter "T" with one arm shorter than the other.
Hinting information is basically a set of instructions, similar to assembly code that tells computer how to round the dimensions, so that all stems of letters are same width, all serifs are same dimensions, ...
Nowadays, there are lots of clever algorithms baked into the [font] rendering libraries, and the computers have enough processing capacity so even without hinting info contained within the font you get nice looking letters on the screen. Plus, most of the hinting info in the font is automatically generated. Still, hand-tweaked hinting info inside the font provides even better results. This is A LOT of work and this is the reason why one good font costs lots of money.
Quote:
Originally Posted by GERGE
On the other hand, eInk capsules aren't geometrically aligned, they are like this: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...rocapsules.png (this is from a Kindle)
There absolutely no way hinting that depends on any kind of a geometrical premise would work and there is no system of hinting I know of that doesn't depend on it. |
Yes, you are right, capsules do not fall into the grid, but the underlying electronics that manipulates the capsules clearly does. I can see that on the linked picture.