on 2012-08-30 6:42 Doug Franklin wrote
On 2012-08-30 3:03, Joseph McAllister wrote:
Anyway, my recollection is that TrueType was a method of minutely smoothing
what was once lumpy pixels. As opposed to Adobe's vector drawing formula.
It's been so long since I had to even think about it. Ya gotta let go of some
of what you knew to make room for FaceBook timelines and Netflix streaming.
Gagh.
TrueType character forms are composed of a set of vectors on (IIRC) a 2048 x
2048 coordinate grid, like a lot of font description languages.
[typography geek alert]
TrueType uses splines (curves) much like PostScript, except the splines are
quadratic as opposed to PostScript's Bézier splines; so neither uses vectors
except insofar splines are a superset of vectors; in both types of fonts,
hinting simply "corrects" the pixels when rendering to low resolution device
(not really smoothing the pixels, just choosing different pixels for a better
result); modern OS's also do literal smoothing of fonts by anti-aliasing
(blurring the edges) and subpixel rendering (exploiting the spatial
relationship of RGB components of a pixel) when rendering type to a display
the grid you mention constrains only the control points of the splines, the
splines themselves (the edges of the glyph that is drawn) are constrained only
by the resolution of the output device
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