Metricsmachine letter pairs not showing

Bart Vollebregt
Bart Vollebregt Posts: 2
edited December 2017 in Type Design Software
Hello everyone, I ran into some problems with Metricsmachine and thought maybe someone here knows how to fix it. 

I've done the kerning for my cursive. The last thing I did in Metricsmachine was add a glyph, that already had kerning, to a group. Something went wrong and I reverted to a backup of the kerning (exported .fea file). Once I loaded the kerning into Metricsmachine again the letterpairs didn't show up. What I currently have is a UFO file with groups and a complete kerning feature file.

The groups could be conflicting but I couldn't find anything that was off yet. Any ideas on how to get things working again? Thanks

Comments

  • Kent Lew
    Kent Lew Posts: 937
    The kerning feature from the .fea file needs to be converted back into UFO kerning.plist data for Metrics Machine to recognize and act upon it. The .fea file export is a translation, not the original data format.

    But you should be able to do this from within Metrics Machine by importing that .fea file back into the UFO: File > Import kerning…

    You’ll be able to tell that it works when the title bar of window indicates “XXXX pairs, XXX groups”. (You won’t see any exiting pairs in the pair list pane until you reopen the UFO in MM, or load a separate Pair List.)
  • Thanks for the quick reply and sharing some info. Exactly my thoughts, I remember that worked before but it didn't do the trick this time. When I clear kerning > import the .fea kerning file in MM > nothing happens. I tried exporting it so see if MM actually imports anything but that doesn't seem to be the case.
  • If you use Fontlab, the script KERN Exchange by Alexander Lubovenko is super handy:
    https://github.com/typedev/MMK_FL_kerning_exchange
    Otherwise I use Glyphs and combine it with MetricsMachine rather easily. 
  • Kent Lew
    Kent Lew Posts: 937
    What font editor are you using for the rest of your development? Do you see evidence of kerning data in the UFO via that editor? Alternately, can you inspect the UFO package to see if the kerning.plist is populated?