Is type hinting for screens still relevant? Should new type designers learn it?

Belleve Invis

@Mike Duggan
Thinking about VF and ideographs, it is almost impossible to hint a variable CJK font satisifies the “screen display quality”. You know how complex they are. Ideographs seldom share positions and stroke (stem) widths among characters, so the `cvar` mechanism cannot be used in this situation.

Dave Crossland

Mike Duggan said:

Worse than no hinting, is bad autohinting. 

What are the URLs for those screenshots?

Mike Duggan

Hi Dave, am travelling this week, I can try find the urls if you really need them? The BBC culture site should be easy enough to find 

Mike Duggan

book of kells url

http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20160425-the-book-of-kells-medieval-europes-greatest-treasure


https://www.canopycanopycanopy.com/browse?sort=published_at_desc


https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/typodermic/superclarendon/webfont_preview.html

Ray Larabie

Here's what Superclarendon's web hinting is supposed to look like (click the web font demo tab).

https://www.fontspring.com/fonts/typodermic/super-clarendon/super-clarendon-light#fontface

https://www.fontspring.com/fonts/typodermic/super-clarendon/super-clarendon-regular#fontface

Hin-Tak Leung

Book of Kells look very decent on android chrome - maybe the problem is windows or MSIE :-)

Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian

Seeing the largest platform as "the problem" is anti-design.

Mike Duggan

Hin-Tak Leung, that looks like a screenshot from a high res screen?

Mike Duggan

Hi Ray, thanks, it looks a lot better there. I have been working with MyFonts on getting improved autohinting, and they have made a lot of improvements lately, using TTFAutohint, for many fonts. it seems they didn't get to update Superclarendon

Rafael Saraiva

Book of Kells look very decent on android chrome - maybe the problem is windows or MSIE :-)

Do you guys know how Android handles hinting? I was told it ignores hinting instructions most of the times... If so, the problem comes from Curious Sans.  I checked the link on Win10 Chrome, MSIE, Firefox and Edge and the problem is consistent among these. Pic below is from Chrome.

Hin-Tak Leung

Mike Duggan said:

Hin-Tak Leung, that looks like a screenshot from a high res screen?

It is from an android phone.

Mike Duggan

yes ok, thanks, so I assume its higher resolution, which may or not be using the hinting in Android. so the problem exists in the hints.

Dave Crossland

Mike Duggan said:

Hi Ray, thanks, it looks a lot better there. I have been working with MyFonts on getting improved autohinting, and they have made a lot of improvements lately, using TTFAutohint, for many fonts. it seems they didn't get to update Superclarendon

Aha, so this badness is the result either a non-ttfa autohinter, or, an old ttfa? Thanks for sharing the links!!

Please could you ask the MyFonts person to drop me a private email, I'd like to discuss