Multiple Master Kerning

Joseph Mičeli
Joseph Mičeli Posts: 3
in Type Design Software
Hello everyone!
I have a question about kerning in multiple master fonts in FontLab.
Lets say you have two separate .vfb fonts representing the extremes of weight.
Now lets say you've kerned both individually and then made a multiple master font via 'blend'.
The new font contains no features or kerning, but if you open a metrics window it seems like some kerning pairs have been retained (while some others have not).
Does anyone know how kerning is dealt with in multiple master fonts? where are the kerning tables stored? is kerning interpolated as well?
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Comments

  • Craig Eliason
    Craig Eliason Posts: 1,440
    The font editor should interpolate the kerning.
  • [Deleted User]
    [Deleted User] Posts: 0
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  • Vassil Kateliev
    Vassil Kateliev Posts: 56
    Blend will produce just that - a blind blend between two typefaces, not MM design, but yes it will interpolate pair-to-pair kerning and will duplicate/copy kerning classes (metric, opentype and etc. also) in the blended new font. So this would do...

    ...on the other hand, I would suggest that you work in MM space entirely, either by using James's "Mask-to-Master" (but load the second font to mask first) or by "Assign new master" (after you have defined new axis, let say wt-"weight"). In MM space I wold double (even triple) check if all my glyph's outlines are structured (to say) correctly after master assignment - are there new points present; do designs interpolate correctly and what can be done to visually improve the resulting designs. And then I would space/kern my design, build up classes and etc. stuff - in this way you could be 99% percent sure that everything will end up "nicely".... after all this very prolonged and unnecessary explanation - my point is that blending fonts is working in blind, I would suggest that you never do that, especially if you are designing a sort of extended/big family (let say more than 3 fonts - as we could agree that really big is something around 7/8 weights expanded over 3/4 widths + italics)....
  • Joseph Mičeli
    Joseph Mičeli Posts: 3
    Thanks for your responses, I see that I've been wasting time messing with blends! I was not clear on how exactly to use the whole mask-to-master concept, thanks for the clear explanation.
  • [Deleted User]
    [Deleted User] Posts: 0
    The user and all related content has been deleted.
  • Joseph Mičeli
    Joseph Mičeli Posts: 3
    Thanks James Montalbano, in fact that was a trick I had been using with the blends as well, good to hear its still a valid approach.

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