From: Peter Constable (petercon@microsoft.com)
Date: Fri Mar 05 2004 - 19:25:09 EST
> From: unicode-bounce@unicode.org [mailto:unicode-bounce@unicode.org]
On Behalf
> Of Adam Twardoch
> It's possible that in a few years, the LCD monitors will have a higher
> resolution so that larger font sizes (in pixels) will be used for
typical
> screen presentation. More pixels -- less elaborate hinting required.
>
> I don't think hinting will completely go away, but I'm sure the
necessity to
> tweak single pixels will gradually disappear.
This may happen, but I think it will take a while. Even if the majority
of desktop displays were to increase in ppi resolution, there will be
for some time products that use lower res displays. And note that
desktop displays have *not* be increasing in ppi as rapidly as you might
think. Try to buy an LCD monitor with better than 96ppi, for instance.
So, unless the default text sizes start increasing, the typical
*pixels-per-em* amount isn't changing that fast.
(In the past few years, I have used some high ppi combinations: I used
to use a 22" display at 1920 x 1440, giving around 115ppi; and now I'm
using a laptop doing 1920x1200 on a 1.6 aspect ration 15.5" display,
giving not quite 150ppi (yum :-). This is using default text sizes, and
in both situations, people looking over my shoulder would regularly ask
how I could read stuff that small -- in spite of the higher ppem I had
than they did on their machines.)
There's no getting around the fact that hinting of 8pt type (fairly
common in UI text) is still going to be important for some time.
Peter
Peter Constable
Globalization Infrastructure and Font Technologies
Microsoft Windows Division
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