User Guide

no matter what font format you want to use.
What is hinting all about?
Hinting is a process by which the computer makes type
look good at small sizes and low resolutions (72 - 600 dots-
per-inch, or “dpi”). To understand hinting, you first have to
understand a bit about how computers print (or as the
techies say, “put dots on the page”).
The oft-forgotten reality of laser printing is that those nice
smooth lines you get out of your printer aren’t really smooth
at all! They are composed of little dots (called pixels) which,
like a mosaic, are all assembled on a grid to form a picture.
At high enough resolution, your eye perceives smoothness
even though there really is jaggedness.
When the printer prints, it has to choose which pixels to turn
on or off to best achieve the desired image. As you can
imagine, it isn’t quite as nice as just drawing smooth curves
on paper with a pen!
To see how that relates to characters and hinting, let’s do
an example. We’ll follow along as the computer constructs
the letter “H” at a small point size, on a low-resolution
printer. First, the computer must get the mathematical
outline of the “H,” scale it to the requested size, and position
it in memory over the pixel grid at the requested location:
Fontographer User's Manual
10: Expert Advice Page #13