RE: [WinMac] Re font spacing
John Nurick(jnurick[at]lrconsulting.co.uk)
Wed, 20 Jan 1999 09:38:14 -0000
David G. Story wrote
[...]
>The point of hinting is to increase the viewabiity of fonts at
> low resolutions
> as well as at tiny sizes (imaged and printed.) It is contained in the
> Postscript font and is passed to the basic printer control
> program in the
> printer, during the printing process (if the Postscript font does not
> already reside in the printer ROM).
>
> TrueType fonts also contain 'hinting'. In Fontographer, you
> can edit or
> turn on/off either the horizontal and/or the vertical hinting, which
> obviously affects the spacing.
Back in the steam age the story was that Type 1 (Postscript) fonts did
not contain hint data; this was done entirely by the rasteriser (ATM on
the screen, Postscript interpreter
in the printer). TrueType fonts OTOH could include font-specific hints
which if present overrode the default algorithm in the rasteriser. Was
this wrong then, and is it wrong now?
> ATM uses BOTH the outline and bitmap file to generate the
> on-screen font,
> not just the Postscript information.
As has been mentioned already on this thread, this isn't true of ATM for
Windows, which doesn't need bitmap fonts at all. On steam age Macs I
seem to remember that you were *advised* to install bitmap fonts at the
commonest sizes if you had the disk space, but this was to make the
screen redraw more quickly rather than because ATM had to have it. I
suppose things could have changed, but it seems like a retrograde step.
John
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