In the early 1980s, letters rasterized from outline fonts at low and medium resolutions had irregular shapes. The lower the resolutions, the greater the irregularities, and the more that typographers criticized the type quality. PostScript fonts, launched in 1985, regularized medium resolution type with secret ingredients coyly called “hints” by Adobe. This prompted competing inventions of font regularization using techniques variously called “instructions,” “delta exceptions,” “procedures,” “intelligence,” and other terms sounding more like hi-tech snake oil than science. Further research and open publication, however, revealed their connections to traditional aesthetics of letter symmetry as well as to modern signal processing, pattern recognition, and psychophysics, thus expanding our understanding of typography in digital culture.

中文翻译：

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字体大战，第 2 部分

在 1980 年代初期，从低分辨率和中等分辨率的轮廓字体光栅化的字母具有不规则的形状。分辨率越低，不规则性就越大，排版师对字体质量的批评也就越多。PostScript 字体于 1985 年推出，使用 Adob​​e 羞怯地称为“提示”的秘密成分规范了中等分辨率类型。这促使字体规范化的竞争发明使用各种称为“指令”、“增量异常”、“程序”、“智能”和其他听起来更像是高科技万金油而不是科学的术语。然而，进一步的研究和公开出版揭示了它们与传统的字母对称美学以及现代信号处理、模式识别和心理物理学的联系，从而扩大了我们对数字文化中排版的理解。