[DejaVu-fonts] Corrections for Greek

[Pavel F. <Pav...@se...>]

Hallo,

I have folowing suggestions for the Greek letters.


1) Kerning pairs for combinations Greek accent + capital Greek letter

I suggest adding kerning pairs for combinations Greek accent +
capital Greek letter. Now, accent + letter looks not very good--the
accent is too far from the letter. I generated the kerning pairs
from the sfd files with the goal that the accent should have
exactly the same position to the letter as it has in the precomposed
letter.

I'm sending the kerning pairs in two formats: *.txt and *.afm. The
*.txt file is plain text file with 3 columns: accent, letter and
kerning. It has the values that should go to the sfd file.
The *.afm file uses the format of the PostScript fonts and the
kerning values are scaled down by factor 1000/2048. Importing the
kerning pairs from the *.afm files is easy, but there are some
rounding errors (nevetheless acceptable). I learned the sfd format
just as much to generate these kerns and it would take me quite some
time to change directly the sfd files.

This is a safe feature to implement, it doesn't break anything.

It would be useful for the typesetting system TeX and I think that
it would be best to implement it in the fonts (more people
could benefit from it).

There are currently just few fonts that implement kerning between
the greek accents and capital letters.


2) Left side bearing of the Greek accents

Unlike the previous it is not so safe to implement. The problem is
that the combination accent + capital letter has much bigger left
side bearing than the precomposed letter.

The sollution would be to move the accents to the left (if the right
side bearing of the accent is changed, than the kerning pairs must be
regenerated), but it would break the precomposed letters and they
should be corrected. Moreover, this can not give exactly the same
results as the precomposed letters (compare the position of accent
in Alphatonos and Epsilontonos), but it can be improved at least.

This should be probably implemented directly in the sfd files and if
you would be interested in it than I could implement it some time
later (probably not so soon).


3) Inconsistent width of some letters

I noticed that the letter Alphatonos in DejaVu Sans Regular is wider
that the letter Alpha. I don't see any reason for this--the base
letter in Alphatonos has exactly the same position as in Alpha and
the accent is hidden on the left side, so there can't be more
collisions on the right side with the following letter.

If you are interested in it I can look if there are similar cases.


Please let me know if you would add the kerns mentioned in the
section 1 to the fonts (and what files you would use in that case)
and what you think about the sections 2 and 3.

This is my first post, so tell me if I did something wrong.

The files are attached to the mail or can be downloaded from:
http://www.multiupload.com/STRQ7R8N83


Best regards,
Pavel Farar