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hinting:

In digital typography, hinting is the process of "instructing" a vector font to display optimally at small point sizes or on low resolution screens.

At its core, a font file consists of glyphs — vector outline drawings of every included character — which are filled onscreen with pixels when the font is called for by a given application. Vector drawings, being representations of mathematical equations rather than static bitmap images, are designed to scale easily downwards or upwards, which makes onscreen font display at virtually unlimited point sizes possible.

However, at smaller sizes or on very low-resolution monitors, the vector's automatic scalability runs aground against the absolute size and shape of the pixel, noticeably limiting the clarity of a glyph's bitmap, or the fixed set of pixels that describes it onscreen. Visible distortion then occurs:
 * architectural details of a character, such as crossbars, or serifs, or relative stem weights, can be squashed or obliterated completely;
 * spacing between letters and words can become uneven;
 * diagonals and curves become asymmetrical and jagged.

This is not only aesthetically unpleasant, but seriously hinders a font's legibility.

To solve the distortion problem, a type designer would then give a glyph's outline hints, or reshape it such that its bitmaps for the smallest sizes at which it will be displayed are clearly readable and better describe the character's original shape. Hinting is often done by hand in WYSIWYG font creation tools, but is represented in the font file as a set of programming instructions.

Hinting in different font formats
A font format comprises the algorithms used to partially automate the process of hinting a font, a specialized programming language, and the rasterizer, which interprets instructions written in the language and governs the onscreen display of fonts. The most important are Postscript Type 1, TrueType, and OpenType (an open-source extension of TrueType).

Postscript Type 1
Adobe developed the Type 1 format in 1984. This set of tightly guarded algorithms