Screen optimised fonts / TrueType hinting services / super-hinting / delta hinting

Typotheque offers an affordable professional in-house TrueType hinting service, which dramatically improves on-screen legibility. Please contact us for more information regarding costs and suitability.

Most commercially available fonts were designed primarily to look good when printed: their designers have invested a lot of effort into making sure that they function well on paper, while largely overlooking how they appear on computer monitors. However, due to the relentless pace of technological change and its impact on how we work, we spend more and more time reading from the screen rather than from printed materials.

Fedra Sans Screen is the first of our fonts to be specially engineered and optimised for exceptional readability on the computer monitor. This small family of four weights combines art, craft and engineering to achieve crystal-clear results on-screen using a system of ‘hinting instructions’. How does this work? Each character in a font consists of a set of mathematically defined outlines which determine its shape and proportions, as well as the thickness of its strokes. These relationships may not, however, produce uniformly ideal results at all point sizes, particularly when scaled to smaller sizes where details of the characters’ shape can easily disappear. Hinting instructions give the designer a tool to correct the way the computer displays the characters on the screen. In technical terms, the designer can manipulate the TrueType outlines prior to rasterization, specifying which pixels (the smallest ‘dot’ that the monitor can display) will be turned on or off, to ensure maximum legibility and aesthetic quality.

While hinting instructions provide the designer with a tremendously powerful tool, the hinting process itself is tremendously labour-intensive, particularly if the designer uses delta-hinting to hand edit each character at each point size. Verdana, a popular screen-optimized font, is the result of years of work. The development of Fedra Sans Screen involved hinting for over 1,560 characters in four weights at every size from 9 pt to 120 pt, or over 40,000 programming instructions. The amount of effort involved explains why screen-optimized fonts are relatively rare.

The example above shows hinted and unhinted screen rendering of the fonts, showing that careful hinting produces fine-tuned text that is easier to read, even at small point sizes on low-resolution devices such as computer monitors and (older) laser printers. And of course, the quality of printed characters remains as high as ever.