The development of digital font formats included a technology that enabled the font maker to improve the display of type on low resolution Media. This technology is called hinting. In reference to the „allegory of the cave“ hinting means: you change the „real“ thing so that its shadow looks more like the original form.
Hinting first came up with the PostScript Format. The term „hinting“ literally means that „hints“ give advice to the rasterizer as to how it has to render a specific glyph in low resolution. Today we have two different outline formats in fonts. This leads to two different hinting approaches. With PostScript outlines hints are a general set of tools. The person who hints can define stems and certain zones. For TrueType outlines there are more tools and they are more powerful. They are called instructions.
For the sake of PostScript we have to add that the display of PostScript fonts is not as problematic as the display of TrueTypes. The reason behind this is that the PostScript rasterizer needs less extra information to create a reasonable output. But, in case of an unexpected issue chances of correcting those are much worse than with the TrueType format, because TrueType hinting knows very powerful tools to control every pixel in the display of font in any point size.
Hints are distinguished into global hints and glyph specific hints. Global hints are parameters that are effective for the whole font, while glyph specific hints are only relevant to individual glyphs and some are even only effective for specific point sizes. We will dive into the world of hints now.
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