Comments on: It’s not a “screen font” any more http://www.thomasphinney.com/2009/04/not-a-screen-font/ the Phinney-us Blog on Typography & Text Wed, 11 Aug 2010 21:30:01 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 By: santi http://www.thomasphinney.com/2009/04/not-a-screen-font/comment-page-1/#comment-361 santi Fri, 24 Apr 2009 06:03:42 +0000 http://www.thomasphinney.com/?p=348#comment-361 Aren't the bitmaps used to display small sizes? <i>[Nope, not any more. Not since OS X 10.0 on Mac, nor in recent Windows rendering systems. - T]</i> What makes me think so is that when I edited the glyphs' vectors from a font editing application and tried to see the result in MS word, smaller sizes looked horrible - even up to 16 points, they just suck. Do you by any chance make/edit fonts and know a way to fix this? :) <i>[Yes, I do, but the answers aren't simple. You don't say what operating system you're on, or what font editor you're using, or what font you modified, so it's hard for me to give very specific advice.... Broadly speaking, something called "hinting" is the key factor in rendering at small sizes on screen. Automatic hinting can do okay, but not great. A really heavily hinted TrueType font (for example, a system font on Windows) will pretty much always suffer in rendering quality if you try to edit it at all. If the font has PostScript style outlines, automatic or simple manual hinting can do fine. You'll need to do some more research/reading to learn more, though. - T]</i> Aren’t the bitmaps used to display small sizes?

[Nope, not any more. Not since OS X 10.0 on Mac, nor in recent Windows rendering systems. - T]

What makes me think so is that when I edited the glyphs’ vectors from a font editing application and tried to see the result in MS word, smaller sizes looked horrible – even up to 16 points, they just suck. Do you by any chance make/edit fonts and know a way to fix this? :)

[Yes, I do, but the answers aren't simple. You don't say what operating system you're on, or what font editor you're using, or what font you modified, so it's hard for me to give very specific advice.... Broadly speaking, something called "hinting" is the key factor in rendering at small sizes on screen. Automatic hinting can do okay, but not great. A really heavily hinted TrueType font (for example, a system font on Windows) will pretty much always suffer in rendering quality if you try to edit it at all. If the font has PostScript style outlines, automatic or simple manual hinting can do fine. You'll need to do some more research/reading to learn more, though. - T]

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