Hinting, is anyone still using it?

Mike Duggan
Mike Duggan Posts: 247
in Font Technology
Just curious to know, if anyone is still using hinting, or probably autohinting still? I did notice a post about some new tools for autohinting Variable fonts, but wondering have we reached the point yet that its just not needed anymore

Comments

  • Todd Johnson
    Todd Johnson Posts: 21
    My opinion, yes, still needed. I use TTFAutohint, then check and adjust with YGT. 
  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,692
    edited June 25
    By default, our font build tool uses TTFAutohint. Coincidentally, Mike, I was thinking about you in this context a couple of days ago, because I recall you did some tests of different configuration options for TTFAutohint. Our build tools can take hinting and gasp table configuration input, but to date I have just run them with default settings. I was thinking I might ask you to review the output when I have a budget for consulting, and see if the results can be improved by tweaking the configuration.
  • Aaron Bell
    Aaron Bell Posts: 97
    I did a hinting project 2 weeks ago.

    Given the long tail of low resolution devices I think there will still be value in manual hinting for quite some time still. And I feel it especially so when I look at the poor output of autohinters. Better not to hint at all than use tools that only really work on Latin, and general sans-serif.
  • Mike Duggan
    Mike Duggan Posts: 247
    thanks Aaron & John! John, keep in touch if you need this at any point. Aaron I agree, and yes it does appear to be a very long tail. Variable font hinting is something that VTT handles well, but as far as I recall TTFautohint doesn't handle Variable fonts, so was curious about how folks include hinting in any new variable fonts.
  • Jens Kutilek
    Jens Kutilek Posts: 392
    At LucasFonts, we still manually hint all of our retail and most of our custom fonts (TTF and OTF). For TTF (static and variable), we hint multiple master sources in FontLab 5 and use a custom compiler to output VTT assembly, which is then compiled to byte code with vttLib. This allows us to cater for rendering environments that FL5 doesn't know about due to its age. I've also rewritten some of FL5's fpgm functions to have nicer zone alignment, nudge accents away from the base glyph if they collide in certain sizes, etc.

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