Spacing problems with connected font

Vitória Neves
Vitória Neves Posts: 19
edited September 2016 in Technique and Theory
I'm working on a connected script font and am trying to limit the kerning as much as possible. To make the characters connect smoothly, what I did was to use the entrance and exit strokes of the "r" and to paste them on the other characters. However, this sometimes creates spacing problems, since some characters are narrower than others. I've tried to change the angle of these entrance and exit strokes, but that doesn't make it any better. 
Does anyone have any suggestions on how to solve or maybe make it less of a problem?
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  • [Deleted User]
    [Deleted User] Posts: 0
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  • Vitória Neves
    Vitória Neves Posts: 19
    @James Montalbano. The r,s,x,v,w, z and also the o are the toughest. I've been really struggling with these :) Thanks for the advice!    
  • [Deleted User]
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  • Laura Worthington
    Laura Worthington Posts: 28
    Yeah, those letters are always tough to work with when it comes to spacing - especially with a cursive r, s, x and z because they have more space on them to the left of the letterform. I have a couple of different methods of dealing with it depending on the design. Sometimes I create different connections to work with as James mentioned, other times I create ligatures instead.
  • Vitória Neves
    Vitória Neves Posts: 19
    @Laura Worthington That makes sense. I have already created some ligatures, but was unsure if that would be OK. Thanks again Laura :smile:
  • Kent Lew
    Kent Lew Posts: 937
    If you can develop in terms of separate contextual alternates with high/middle/low connections for entry & exit, rather than specific ligatures, you may find things to be easier to manage when you get around to providing Extended Latin coverage.

    Otherwise, you set yourself up for the headache of figuring out and deriving all possible accented ligature variations. For example, what I wound up having to do to extend Jessica Hische’s Tilda for Font Bureau:



    Even though I was able to script a fair amount of this development (once I researched and narrowed down the reasonably likely combinations), so that in the end it wasn’t too onerous, still, I don’t recommend this approach.

    [And that snapshot doesn’t include the .fina variants with shortened exit for several of these.]
  • Vitória Neves
    Vitória Neves Posts: 19
    @Kent Lew Thanks a lot for sharing your experience. That's quite helpful. 

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