On Screen Legibility

The Monotype team specializes in enhancing the readability of User Interface fonts (UI fonts) used on computer displays, game consoles, mobile phones, and other electronic devices.

The way TrueType fonts are rendered on screen varies in different Font Engines and platforms. Monotype can develop UI fonts with optimal legibility that are tuned to specific display environments.

For fonts in the TrueType format we offer Screen Optimized fonts. Through a typographic engineering process called "hinting", the pixels used to display the UI fonts are optimized to provide crisp on-screen viewing at any point size. The hints, or typographic coding, adjust the characters in a UI font so the appropriate pixels are turned "on" or "off" at various point sizes to maximize legibility.

An example of an un-tuned character

An example of manually tuned font with black & white "hints" applied.

There are various attributes which Monotype's font experts use to properly hint a UI font:

• Color - a paragraph of text should look balanced, with no uneven or inconsistent character shapes.
• Readability - every character should be recognizable, even at very small sizes.
• Spacing - there should be consistent spacing between characters and words.
• Weight - proper control of weights across font styles and at various sizes
• Alignment - maintaining proper character shape alignments within a font and a typeface family.
• Diagonals - controlling italic and oblique fonts to obtain stroke weight consistency and symmetry.

Here is an example showing fonts with typical auto-hinting (left) and after Monotype manual hinting applied (right).

The Monotype team is recognized as experts in tuning fonts for on-screen display, for both Latin and non-Roman fonts including Arabic, Hebrew, Indic, Chinese, Japanese and Korean fonts.

Please contact us to learn more about Screen Optimized fonts or our User Interface font solutions.