What is Postscript hinting ?
In the Postscript format, the glyph hints are much, much smaller, since they only describe high-level “features” of the glyph outline, i.e. “stems” and “top/bottom edges”. It is up to the font engine to use them intelligently to optimize grid-fitting. Depending on the cleverness of the algorithm being employed, this results in text quality that can range from poor to good, but will generally never exceed the capabilities of a highly-hinted TrueType fonts. However, these hints are generally much easier to design, making the font designer’s work much more enjoyable. In short, creating high-quality hinted Postscript fonts is a lot easier than with TrueType, even if it still takes time.
