Re: [Fontforge-users] advice sought

[Peter B. <ps...@vi...>]

Larson, Timothy E. wrote:
> Anyone care to pass on good tips or rules-of-thumb for kerning?  The only one I know is to not use kerning to make up for sloppiness in the side bearings.  Assuming I've done this well so that it looks reasonable in applications that don't support kerning, what can I do to ensure that my lines don't condense or expand drastically when kerning is applied?
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> Thanks,
> Tim
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>   
I had thought it might be possible to Google up a decent kerning 
tutorial or some set of guidelines, but I haven't found one. My own view 
is that one oughtn't to get too carried away, and one ought to keep in 
mind the kind of font one is designing. A font that emulates handwriting 
will probably need more kerning than others because letterspacing in 
handwriting is infinitely variable. An old-style type on the other hand 
might tolerate a good bit of unevenness in letterspacing because that's 
how all but the finest old books look.

FontForge has an auto-kerning feature that (I think I recall) allows you 
to specify tighter or looser spacing. Nice, but in my view there's no 
substitute for printing out lots of samples and looking them over 
carefully. I once used the corncob English word-list to try to find out 
all possible letter-combinations with a view to determining which of 
them needed kerning. (Some letter-combinations don't occur, or occur 
only at morpheme boundaries, and so oughtn't to be kerned.) I wish I had 
saved my project in a file; perhaps someday I'll do that.