When viewing characters on a screen, smaller sizes can cause characters to appear blurry or lines to look uneven. The technology used to prevent said phenomena is called “hinting.”

Why do the characters blur? The characters included in a font are composed of smooth curved lines (vector data) drawn with the use of calculation formulas. However, the monitor displaying the characters is just a collection of square pixels. When trying to fit smooth curved lines into square grids, the lines inevitably cross pixel boundaries. As a result, the characters blur.

Hinting is a technology that embeds instructions (hints) within font data, telling the font to “deliberately distort the shape slightly to fit beautifully into the pixel grid” when displaying characters at small sizes or on low-resolution screens.

There are two types of hinting: “PostScript hinting” and “TrueType hinting.” In this series, I will focus on the “PostScript hinting” used in retail fonts made by Type Project and examine what it consists of.

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