Why some Fonts looks "Irregular" bigger than 12pt ?

[Martin Iturbide]

Hi

I'm not sure if I asked this before.
I need some bigger fonts (not because I'm getting old, just because we use higher screen resolutions now  ) but when I try to use a font that allows me the go bigger than 12, it looks "irregular" (not sure which word to use, since I don't want to use "bad").

I'm using a 1920x1080 VM and the Font Palette can show you my issue (Screen shot attached).

Why is this happening? Is there any way to improve my situation?

Regards

[Alex Taylor]

The four lousy looking ones are TrueType ones I made, and I can tell you exactly why: it's because they're not manually hinted.

Vector-based fonts like TrueType will naturally tend to look jaggy and uneven when reduced to a pixel grid without anti-aliasing. The proper way around this is to manually hint (or "grid-fit") the font. With TrueType/OpenType this is done using an extremely complex instruction syntax that resembles assembly-language programming (and can be about as difficult and complicated). It's a rare skill which TTBOMK is only possessed by a small number of highly-paid professionals, and is certainly beyond my capacity as a hobbyist.

This page explains the problem in more detail.

In this day and age, when most platforms anti-alias fonts as a matter of course, hinting is less commonly done. I think you'll find that these fonts look quite a lot better in Mozilla, QT, or OpenOffice, than they do under "raw" Presentation Manager output (which can't do antialiasing).

[Martin Iturbide]

Thanks Alex.

So I understand that the choices will be to:
- To manually hint the fonts, which takes a lot of efforts.
- To include/hack antialiasing on Presentation Manager that will be a lot more of efforts.

Regards