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I don't know, my "cool Apple owning friends" told me for years that unhinted font rendering was better, and I always thought they could pry my Bitstream Vera from my cold dead hands. Then I used OS X full-time for a while. Upon switching back to Linux, I immediately turned hinting off. It just... looked "wrong".

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The difference is that with no hinting you optimize for maintaining the shape of the characters, while with hinting you optimize for having the shapes falling on pixels.

“cool Apple friends” have often been graphic-oriented people, so they preferred seeing their fonts right. Windows and Linux people only saw blur because they were less trained to look at fonts.

(I know, this is a generalization, I disabled hinting myself on my Linux machine years ago, and I’m no graphic person at all)

I've actually found that I like neither no hinting (OS X) or full hinting (Windows). What I've found I like is a slight hinting. I get mostly the shape of the letters like you see in OS X and a semi decent (probably not for an artist) font sizes. This also gets me letters that get fit to my pixels and makes it look nice (I don't have a 300dpi screen where you can't tell the difference).

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