Quote:
Originally Posted by sherman
Hinting:
Hinting will generally have no noticeable effects. There are some cases it can have a detrimental effect however. This seems to be the case with hand-hinted fonts for the most part. If a font looks ugly/uneven, chances are it could be a hinting, and you should try stripping hints from the font to see if that improves matters.
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True, if a font doesn't look smooth it is most likely a hinting problem and it can affect any type of font. However, you do not have to remove the hinting info from the font. Just update it.
I had this issue with some Adobe fonts which I had slightly thickened to improve the visibility of the regular and italics sub family font types. I used FontLab Studio to do this and experimenting with the (auto) hinting settings/parameters of FontLab Studio didn't make the font more smooth.
My advice: the best way to fix hinting issues is to use the freeware tool Type Lite (
http://www.cr8software.net/typelight.html). Open the problematic font and choose the menu entry Global > Convert to TT curves or Convert to PS curves. Then save (or overwrite) the font as .ttf (TT curves) or .otf (PS curves). After that your font will look much smoother.
You can use this tool to convert fonts from TTF to OTF and vice versa by using the procedure above.
You can also use the same tool to fix other font issues (internal naming, etc.).