Need to edit chinese font file to remove extra space after apostrophe in FontLab VI.

Comments

  • Ramiro EspinozaRamiro Espinoza Posts: 839
    edited October 2018
    Can you open the font and set these words in FL VI? It looks like the accented letters have not the same side bearings as the base character.
  • It seems that you got the full width characters for those accents. And it is not an apostrophe but an acute.
  • As there is nothing "Chinese" about that text: use another font.
  • @Theunis de Jong It's Droid Sans Chinese and the Latin glyphs have a number of issues.
  • Chinese users often get/expect monospaced Latin. I suspect is a design feature, not a bug. (Although you may well have valid reasons for wanting to change it, of course.)
  • @Thomas Phinney It's a bug. Unaccented letters have OK spacing and accented versions are monospaced. And there are design flaws as well. I think the accented latin glyphs were added later, possibly by other designers.
  • Whether it's viewed as a 'design feature' or a 'bug' is open to debate, but it seems to be very common among CJK fonts, especially older ones which predate widespread support for GSUB features. Fullwidth forms are preferred when latin characters are mixed in with CJK characters, but unicode only provides codepoints for fullwidth versions of the basic ASCII character set. I found many fonts where the basic ASCII range are proportional, but other latin characters are designed to match the fullwidth forms. Presumably whoever designed these fonts assumed that fullwidth characters would be preferred, but opted to include proportional characters in those slots which 'duplicate' encoded fullwidth characters in case latin text was set in isolation. Converting ASCII to encoded fullwidth forms would be straightforward even in the absence of GSUB features, whereas converting other latin characters to (unencoded) fullwidth equivalents would be problematic.

    The solution really is to not use CJK fonts for latin text.
  • Here is the history:
    The term "half-width"/"full-width" (半角/全角) is born in 1980s. In that old age, all non-ASCII characters need two bytes to be stored, and two screen cells to be displayed. So in many old CJK typefaces all non-ASCII characters are made in 1em wide.
    As for apostrophe (’), it is also used as the single quote symbol in Chinese (‘’), and they should have extra space outside it. Adobe used LOCL feature to turn them into narrow form in non-CJK context.
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