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Applications / Re: Why some Fonts looks "Irregular" bigger than 12pt ?
« on: May 19, 2023, 01:41:34 am »
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).
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).