Re: Char. spacing (kerning?) basics?
By contrast, proportional type is designed to allocate the space required by individual letters to give a roughly even inter-letter spacing. Since different letters combine with various others in different ways (from an optical perspective), the hinting tables are built in the more complete font sets to instruct the font rendering engine how to space various common letter pairs. Further, really complete font sets often contain "expert sets" that contain various alternates, which often include alternate punctuation and "swash" characters, for example.
David,
What you are referring to here is kerning, not hinting (let's chalk this up to the lateness of the hour).
Kerning tables are what the font designer uses to tell the software how to adjust the horizontal distance between particular letter pairs. For example, a W, in a proportional font, is a wide letter. And to prevent to tips of the letter from crashing into adjacent letters, there are narrow blank strips, called sidebearings, to the left and right of the W. But if the letter that follows the W is A (note the complementary slopes), we want the A to scootch a bit to the left and tuck in under the arm of the W. That's accounted for in a kerning table, and if you turn on kerning in the application, it should come out okay.
Hinting is something different. It has to do with the way curves intersect rectangular pixels as a font is scaled up or down on the screen (either by changing the point size or the view zoom). A hint tells the rasterizing engine (the program that actually paints the font on the screen) when and how to cheat a little to create an optical illusion of uniform stroke thickness, uniform x-height, etc. A simple way to think of it is this: if the edge of a stroke is curving up through one pixel and down through the next, do you make those two pixels black, or do you make the two pixels above them black and makes these two white? Well, the hinting of the character tells the rasterizer which way to go at any given moment.
Antialiasing (font smoothing) is a technique of figuring out what percentage of a pixel is, theoretically, covered by black "ink" and then making the color of the pixel a shade of gray that represents that percentage. So if a curve exactly bisects a pixel, that pixel will be colored 127, 127, 127 (#7F7F7F), for example. But antialiasing is in addition to hinting, not instead of it. You still need hinting to keep the font from looking like it is jiggling all over the line.
Dick
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