I'm trying to recreate a pleasing page layout from an existing pdf as a way to get more familiar with book design in latex.
The geometry part was fairly simple to get right, but I've come across a strange phenomenon related to font apperence: On-screen the original looks wonderful while my version seems to have a much darker color and doesn't look nearly as nice even though I've closely matched the dimensions, leading, line-breaks and (natrually) the body font. If I zoom-in the visual difference disappears. xelatex and fontspec were used to generate the PDF and the font is in OpenType Format.
After investigating I discovered that turning off the "text hinting" option (I'm using okular on Linux) makes both versions appear identical, while turning it back on improves the appearence of the original dramatically yet has only a negligable effect on my version.
Obviously, the hinting information in my version is either different or missing then what's used by the original.
What can I do to correct this? How can I inspect the files to figure out what's going on? What should I be looking for?