Hi, Le 30 avr. 07 à 13:16, The Wanderer a écrit :
Guillaume Poirier wrote:
I have the greatest difficulties to understand what you meant here by "hinting". I know the word "hint" (like in the sense "I'll give you a hint") and I know the sense of "hinting" as "optimizing" but somehow doubt that this is what you mean here.
Could you explain to me what it means?
Until recently, I had virtually no idea what this not infrequently used term meant in the context of fonts. Last week, I had occasion to read the Wikipedia entry on PostScript, and found enough information on font hinting to give me some clue.
By my recent/new understanding, font hinting is a matter of informing some program (whether hardware or software) which parts of a character are important to preserve when scaling up or down so that the character will still look good afterwards. It's along the lines of "hint: you should keep this part, those others aren't as important".
(Now, of course, very likely someone who knows better will either correct me or at least expand on the point, and I'll wind up feeling mildly foolish for having posted. Oh well...)
Thanks for taking the time to explain this to me. It helped me understand what it meant, however, it's been a big tough to translate to French. I'm not sure if what I translated preserved all the meaning, but it's not like I'm an expert in content creation ;-) Thanks! Guillaume