John Hudson

Most kerning in Latin fonts involves diagonal or overhanging shapes., i.e. the shapes that are exceptional to the straight-straight, round-round, and straight-round relationships that determine the default spacing.

The only times you should ever find yourself kerning a straight to a round is an uppercase straight being followed by a lowercase round, which in some designs might benefit from being slightly tightened.

When I'm kerning, I look at everything, including straight-straight, etc. in context of words, because its a process that I find useful to confirm default spacing. But when I examine the results in the kerning, I typically see the same set of kern pairs involving diagonals and overhang shapes.


None. And diagonal and overhang shapes produced big gaps within words. We can do better.

[This is diverted from the capital eszett thread. I thought it deserved its own topic.]

John Savard wrote:
It is also notable, however, that the rounded — or, in any case, serifless — corner form that recalls the Greek origin of this letter persists as an option in both upper- and lowercase in early civil schrift types following the Petrine alphabet reform. These images are from Abram Shitsgal's 1947 work Графическая основа Русского гражданского шрифта (Graphical basis of Russian civil schrift).













The last two illustrations are from 1748 and 1749 respectively. By this time, one also sees the uppercase form with serif at the upper left, and by the 1770s the serif has become common in the lowercase too.

None of which should imply that I'm actually agreeing with Hrant here, only noting that he is not reaching so far back in his assertion.

Much, much better. Glyph Tweaker allows you to control height, width, x-stem gain, and y-stem gain as independent values.

I think Karsten made it, as the name suggests, with fairly minor adjustments to weight or proportion in mind: just tweaking. I use it more like a sledgehammer.

Not often I agree with Hrant, but yes, of the ones you list I would say Letters of Credit first.

@Erwin Denissen's Font Creator is often overlooked — maybe because it's Windows-only   —, but it is a good tool, and was one of the very first with colour font support.

I'm still using FontLab Studio 5 on Windows on a daily basis, and FontLab VI is being developed for both Mac and Windows.