Hinting Basics

Designers of PostScript fonts provided “hints,” or general guidelines that the PostScript interpreter could use to decide which pixels to turn on. Later, TrueType took hinting a step further because font designers could add detailed instructions—essentially programming code—that tell the rasterizer exactly what to do to optimize the appearance of the font.

This user guide won’t teach you how to hint—it assumes you already know how to do that. This chapter gives a brief overview of hinting, explains tasks you can do before you start hinting, and describes some basic features of hinting with Visual TrueType.