I'm working on an old style italic and I was checking how Adobe does the spacing.
I noticed that there is a difference of around 50-60 units more on the left sidebearing compared to the right sidebearing of each glyph on most of their fonts.
Can somebody tell me what is the rationale behind that.
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Comments
http://www.typophile.com/node/14966
This is not unique to italics. In roman type, the lowercase stem letters—"b," "h," "n," etc.--are not visually equal, so the left side requires a bit more sidebearing than the right. This has to be balanced through the font. There are, however, no kerns on the caps in roman letters.
The old guys were extraordinarily disciplined and didn't have kerning tables to fix their sloppiness. Yet, if you look at the fit of Jenson's Eusebius type or Bauer's metal Futura (or any number of others), you'll see how perfect spacing could be achieved by clever handling of sidebearings. There's no reason to do anything differently in digital type--it's the same set of issues, even though we now have the habit of kerning the "problem" combinations, such as "Wo" and To." You can't achieve good fit with kerning alone.
If you're looking for more information, try Walter Tracy's book "Letters of Credit."