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HINT The letterforms that make up a digital font are usually defined mathematically in terms of outlines or templates, which can be freely scaled, rotated and moved about. When pages are composed, these outlines are given specific locations and sizes. They must be rasterized: converted into solid forms made up of dots or the resolution low, the raster or grid will be coarse, and the dots will fill the mathematical template very imperfectly. Hints are the rules of compromise applied to in this process of rasterization. At large sizes and high resolutions, they are irrelevant. At smaller sizes and lower resolutions, where distortion is inevitable, they are crucial. Most, but not all, digital fonts are hinted. That is, they include hints as integral parts of the font definition.
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is from the Phoenician kheth (or heth). Both its sound and letter shape are suspected to have come from Egyptian hieroglyphs, originally connoting a bundle or twisted string. H as we know it surfaced in Greece about 550 BC. Editors today are sometimes at odds whether the letter is an aspirate or not.
