

Behind-the-scenes look at making fonts - tblancpain
http://ilovetypography.com/2015/01/13/making-fonts-gt-sectra/

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tblancpain
Thierry here from Grilli Type – we released GT Sectra. Let me know if you have
any questions or comments!

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Mithaldu
Zooming out on the sample page ( [http://grillitype.com/typefaces/gt-
sectra](http://grillitype.com/typefaces/gt-sectra) ) seems to indicate there
is no font hinting. I think it would be nice if you'd indicate to customers
that it's a bad idea to use this font in low-dpi situations.

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tblancpain
Font hinting is relative, and there’s many levels of font hinting. To simplify
(a lot), the main levels are: 1) Absolutely no hinting information present 2)
Auto-hinting process used to create hinting information 3) Manual hinting
process used to create hinting information

Our typefaces for the web are auto-hinted, the only realistic possibility for
smaller foundries. We hint them with all possible auto-hinting tools and then
decide which one looks best (per style) across all rendering environments. The
results will never be perfect, but absolutely acceptable across a large number
of rendering environments and type sizes used.

No auto-hinted font is going to look perfect at 8px sizes, for that you
absolutely need hand-hinted fonts (and even then they look like crap). But
hand-hinting a font costs thousands of dollars per style – or about $50 per
character, more or less. Only big foundries and operating system providers
like Microsoft can do that. GT Sectra for example contains around 900 glyphs
per style, across 30 styles.

Additionally, the whole industry is moving away from manual hinting, as more
and more high-dpi devices are on the market, and operating systems’ rendering
of typefaces becomes less and less dependent on hinting information (OS X
ignores it completely, for example). It’s just not an investment that’s really
worth it going forward.

You can see GT Sectra in small use for example in use on
[http://reportagen.com](http://reportagen.com) – and it holds up pretty
decently in my opinion. Or don’t you think?

~~~
Mithaldu
Thanks a lot for the detailed information! Personally i still wish people
would not release unhinted fonts, because they are invariably used by people
who're completely oblivious to the difference and simply make large swathes of
text nigh-unreadable.

That said, the usage on reportagen.com does impress me. It's by no means
perfect (A and other uppercase letters could use some love), but otherwise the
width of vertical lines is consistent overall, making it quite readable even
at small font sizes and without anti-aliasing.

