Great write up, and helpful to the new, and according to the comments, the well versed alike. I’m curious to hear more about what TypeKit is doing to auto hint. Does that mean you all are attempting to apply an auto-hint to one font at a time and adjusting it per font? Or are you aiming at an algorithm that will cover more ground?

This is probably one of the main points that will draw people to use TypeKit over other services I would think.

Richard, very hard to give any numbers in my opinion. In hinting, like with many things in the world, initial improvements can be achieved quickly and without too much effort but as you get closer to perfection the effort that is necessary to achieve improvements increases. Good autohinting – we are currently improving our own system at Typekit – is already better than no hinting at all. Spending a few hours setting manual hints fixes most remaining problems but if you want relly perfect rendering you can spend much more time, virtually without any upper limit. Thinking of Verdana as an extreme example, where the hinting probably took weeks or months.

Rich, all web fonts use Bézier curves. TrueType-based formats use 2nd order (quadratic) Bézier curves whereas PostScript-based formats use 3rd order (cubic) Bézier curves.