Proof of Concept: Contextual Kerning UI for Glyphs 3

yanone
yanone Posts: 130
in Type Design Software
All present-day font editors lack the option to define contextual kerning using a UI. I made a bunch of scriptlets that together form a tool to implement contextual kerning for Glyphs 3, hijacking the normal kerning user interface after a contextual kerning "mode" was activated.

It saves the contextual kerning values in Glyphs’ "Numbers" (named data points that can have different values per master) that can be referenced in feature code as variables ("Tokens"). This also works in glyphsLib.

The tool is usable, but I wish that font editors would one day implement such functionality natively, so I labelled it "Proof of Concept". If you run into any trouble using this, please let me know.

https://github.com/yanone/Yanone-GlyphsApp-Scripts/tree/main/Contextual Kerning

Comments

  • Grzegorz Luk (gluk)
    Grzegorz Luk (gluk) Posts: 161
    edited December 2022
    brilliant idea! And thank your example on github (pos L' space T -40) I discovered that 'space' in most programs nowadays don't break contextual chain, like a years ago!

  • Grzegorz Luk (gluk)
    Grzegorz Luk (gluk) Posts: 161
    thanks to this thread I started trying contextual kerning and solved the problem of WWW.A WWW.H in my font. I can confirm that it works in Scribus, Firefox, Chrome, Inkscape (with small bug). Small thing and make me a day  :)

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