Copy and scale uppercase kerning to small caps with a script

Ramiro Espinoza
Ramiro Espinoza Posts: 839
edited January 2017 in Font Technology
One more simple Robofab script to copy and scale uppercase kerning to small caps. With the 'factor' variable you can decide how much the kerning should be reduced to better fit small caps.
**Warning**: the resulting kerning will always need manual tweaking. Remember that capitals and small caps have different proportions.
#FLM: ReType CopyKerningUC2sc V 1.0
# Copy & scale kerning from UC to sc

from robofab.world import CurrentFont

font = CurrentFont()
kerning = font.kerning

	
left = ['A', 'AE', 'B', 'C', 'D', 'E', 'F', 'G', 'H', 'I', 'J', 'K', 'L', 'M', 'N', 'O', 'OE', 'P', 'Thorn', 'Q', 'R', 'S', 'T', 'U', 'V', 'W', 'X', 'Y', 'Z']
middle = ['A', 'AE', 'B', 'C', 'D', 'E', 'F', 'G', 'H', 'I', 'J', 'K', 'L', 'M', 'N', 'O', 'OE', 'P', 'Thorn', 'Q', 'R', 'S', 'T', 'U', 'V', 'W', 'X', 'Y', 'Z']


factor = 10

for A in left:
	for B in middle:
		if kerning[A, B] is not None:
			kerning[str.lower(A)+'.sc', str.lower(B)+'.sc'] = (kerning[A, B]) - factor
								
		
print 'Klaar!!'

font.update()

Comments

  • Hey Ramiro, thanks for sharing this. I was thinking about replacing the left/middle list by extracting the font for UC glyphs from .sc glyphnames directly. So it is not necessary to provide a list of UC glyphs. There are exceptions of course like uni names and there are probably smarter solutions, but I just quickly did a small addition. Taking classes/groups into account would be another addition, but no big deal actually. 
    font = CurrentFont()
    # collects .sc glyphs in font
    <div>smallCaps = [name for name in font.keys() if ".sc" in name]</div><div>
    # makes uppercase from smallcaps
    </div><div>upperCaseFromSmallCaps = [name.split(".")[0].title() for name in smallCaps if name.split(".")[0].title() in font.keys()]</div><div>
    # adds some exeptions: e.g. OE / AE / AEacute etc. (glyphsnames were the first 2 chars are Uppercase)
    </div><div>upperCaseFromSmallCaps.extend([name[0:2].upper()+name[2:].strip(".sc") for name in smallCaps if name[0:2].upper()+name[2:].strip(".sc") in font.keys()])</div><div>
    left = upperCaseFromSmallCaps
    middle = upperCaseFromSmallCaps</div>