Typography Word of the Day: Hinting

Fifth in an irregular series.

Shaded squares suggest hint at rendering type at smaller sizes (illustration courtesy Owen Taylor from the site fishsoup.net

In digital typography, the letterforms and glyphs that make up a font are defined by templates which the typographer and designer can freely scale, rotate and move them to thier (or the design’s) needs.

When output to a digital device, however, the image is usually reduced to pixels – a square grid that gets imperfectly filled by a vector path. A very close look at any scaled-up bitmap will suggest the problems that can happen. In the particular case of digital type, and particularly at smaller sizes, directly mapping the scaled character to the grid will cause problems (parts of letters dropped out, counters and bowls filled in) unless that coarseness is taken into account.

The act of doing so is called hinting. This attribute, usually built into the font file by the designer, gives the rendering process the suggestions (hints) it needs to fill in the proper pixels – zones of tolerance to one side or the other of the true letterform – towards the aim of keeping the font readable at small sizes as well as keeping the appearance of the font as intact as possible.

That way, your Garamond still looks like Garamond at very small sizes – that is, if your output hardware can take the hint.