Comic Sans was An alternative history... 4294

It isn't only dpi that's relevant, it's ppm. On a 1000 dpi output device, text printed at small sizes will still render at a low enough ppm where hinting can make a noticeable difference.

For example, in Times (the Adobe Type 1 version), the width of the vertical stem of the lowercase i is 84 units.

When output on a 1000 dpi printer, 9 pt times is rendered at roughly 110 ppm which means the width of that vertical stem will be around 9.25 pixels. buttuming a rasterisation algorithm in which any pixel partially contained by the outline is filled, this means that the stem will be rendered as either 10 or 11 pixels wide depending on how it is aligned with the grid. A 10% difference in stem width between successive characters is enough to be noticeable.

n.b. all values above are rather back-of-the-envelope.

Most definitely.

This sounds reasonable, but I think that now with faster RIPs available, ignoring hinting would be a mistake. The circumstances under which it makes a difference will arise considerably less often in higher res printing, but not so infrequently that discarding it seems warranted.

AndrŽ

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