On Thu, 31 Dec 2020 12:18:27 +0900, Tatsuyuki Ishi wrote: >> On Thu, 31 Dec 2020 15:26:43 +1300, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote: > >> Surely antialiasing makes hinting unnecessary. > > It doesn't. "Antialiasing makes hinting unnecessary" is simply wrong > as a general statement: hinting definitely makes a difference and > improves clarity at lower scaling factors like 125%. Try comparing a > 1px stem snapped to pixel grid and another centered on the boundary > of a pixel; there's no way the latter would look as sharp as the > former.
That sharpness comes at the expense of distortion. Hinting is all about hacking the shapes of glyphs to fit the pixel grid -- for example, getting rid of subtle curves and slants. Anti-aliasing gives you a way of representing these.
