If you want to determine if a font file has hinting (many older fonts do not, because it was patented) use <command>fc-query <replaceable>/path/to/fontfile</replaceable> | grep 'fonthashint:'</command>: which will report 'True(s)' or 'False(s)'. Some recent fonts with both TTF and OTF versions will have hinting in the TTF files.