modern text font without kerning or with just a few kerning pairs

Lukas Horn

Helllo,
Do you know a modern text font that isn’t using kerning pairs at all? Or maybe just a very very few?

Dan Reynolds

Georgia!

Jacques Le Bailly

The Original version of Trinité.

Nick Shinn

I designed Bellefair with none. Like Georgia, targeting screen use. While original, it’s classic, not modern in the sense of style.

Erwin Denissen

Nick Shinn said:

I designed Bellefair with none. Like Georgia, targeting screen use. While original, it’s classic, not modern in the sense of style.

Both Georgia and Bellefair have over 5000 kerning pairs.

Nick Shinn

Both Georgia and Bellefair have over 5000 kerning pairs.

I didn’t know that, I certainly didn’t put them there! 

That wasn’t my intention. 

It is a Google font, though, so that might explain where the kerns came from.

Florian Hardwig

What version of Georgia are you looking at? Georgia v5.00 has zero kerning. Georgia Pro includes kerning.

Bellefair v1.003 indeed has kerning. Unfortunately it’s not been added in a systematic way, e.g. you’ll find lots of questionable results of class kerning like an uncalled-for +100 for unlikey pairs like ťħ, while common and semi-common things like f’ f” Yv or Yg were left unkerned. I’m sympathetic to both Nick’s original idea of designing without kerning, “old style”, as well as to a standard well-kerned font. This is neither fish nor fowl, alas.

Erwin Denissen

I have Georgia version 5.59 (modified date 2017-10-17) running Windows 10.

Yes, I also noticed some strange kerning pairs in Bellefair, e.g.

  subtable "Subtable 1" {
    pos P V <24> <0>;
    pos f asterisk <48> <0>;
    pos f question <72> <0>;
  }

It seems modern text fonts without kerning are hard to find!

Johannes Neumeier

Just a comment, but at least the Bellefair source has only a handful of Latin kerning class pairs, and a few Hebrew kerning pairs. Of course expanding kerning classes to all the possible individual pair kerns makes the number explode.

John Hudson

What's strange about those kern pairs, Erwin? A positive kern between f* and f? is very frequently needed.

Erwin Denissen

John Hudson said:

What's strange about those kern pairs, Erwin? A positive kern between f* and f? is very frequently needed.

You are right, the kern pairs seem fine, it is just awkward that the sub table only contains 3 items. Other lookups contain useless items, here are four:

lookup PairAdjustment3 {
  lookupflags RightToLeft IgnoreMarks;

  subtable "Subtable 1" {
    pos space "resh-hebr" <0> <0>;
  }
  subtable "Subtable 2" {
    pos "bet-hebr" "yod-hebr" <-20 0 -20 0> <0>;
    pos "bet-hebr" "shin-hebr" <-10 0 -10 0> <0>;
    pos "gimel-hebr" space <0 0 0 0> <0>;
    pos "gimel-hebr" slash <0 0 0 0> <0>;
    pos "zayin-hebr" "punctuationgeresh-hebr" <0 0 0 0> <0>;

It seems both kern and mark features have been added later, as those are only included in the default languages.

Nick Shinn

This is a bit of a non-issue—although Bellefair’s lack of kerning is an integral part of its design, a feature not a bug, so the fact that it’s been f**ked up once out of my hands is somewhat annoying. But Open Source is what it is.

In the first place, so many designers, typographers and design studios have a “best practice” (note quote marks!) of applying “Optical” kerning as their default, ignoring designer kerning, or lack therof.

Most significantly, I always start off spacing glyphs via sidebearings, so fonts work As Good As Possible without kerning, then add the kerning. Doesn’t everyone? So if you want a modern text font that’s non-kerned, just turn off kerning. I mean, it’s not <rlig>.