Kerning disappears in webfont

Jasper de Waard

Hi,

I'm working on a webfont, and constantly testing using fontsquirrel's webfont generator, but the kerning doesn't work. I've tried expanding all kerning, and even resetting everything and make a new pair, but it's not working. I guess it has something to do with the settings in fontlab. Any ideas?

James Puckett

Have you tried a different generator? Also, have you tried other fonts to be sure the generator is working?

Jason Campbell

what browser are you testing in? Do you have optimize-legibility set?

SiDaniels

Does the kerning work in browsers with the real font installed locally? Are you sure the converter is breaking the kerning?

Jasper de Waard

Thanks James, you're right. The kerning also disappeared when I tried it with verdana. The 'expert' section of fontsquirrel's webfont generator has a (unchecked) checkbox that says 'Remove Kerning', so I figured it probably doesn't do that by default.

Jason, I'm testing in Safari, which does seem to support kerning for as far as I can see.

SiDaniels, I'm using the html files generated by the webfont generator, because I don't want to have to manually update a file on my own server constantly.

I'm curious, how do you guys do webfont testing? I'm testing about every ten minutes, which seems necessary to me, so there must be a quick way to do this.

By the way, I've sent an email to fontsquirrel about their generator. Will report soon.

Jason Campbell

In my testing of Safari, kerning is only enabled if your CSS uses
text-rendering: optimizeLegibility;
I don't know if the generator's html adds that or not.

SiDaniels

>SiDaniels, I'm using the html files generated by the webfont generator, because I don't want to have to manually update a file on my own server constantly.

I'm asking if you've tried the real font. How do you know its the converter if you don't know if the real font kerns?

Jasper de Waard

@jason: i've tried in safari, firefox, and chrome. Didn't work. But thanks for the tip, I think I might have to set up my own webpage to test.

@Si: sorry for my vagueness. I know for sure that the kerning in verdana works, and verdana's kerning also disappears in the html file, so it has something to do with the generator.

Jasper de Waard

Found on this forum, I'd say this is by far the best option! Kerning works, possibilities are endless. http://www.impallari.com/testing/

Thierry Blancpain

Jasper, just to reconfirm, as others have said, browsers currently only activate kerning when optimizeLegibility is set. That is, if the browser supports it at all. Nearly all modern browsers do, though.

I believe some of it came from limitations of computing power in the early days, some of it came because of the limitations of browser rendering engines – Webkit browsers, until only a while ago, weren’t able to position glyphs on non-integer positions due to how their type rendering engine worked.

SiDaniels

That's not exactly true - IE 10 and 11 and a bunch of other recent browser versions support kerning via "font-feature-settings" see http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-fonts/#font-feature-settings-prop

Thomas Phinney

See also: http://caniuse.com/font-feature

Ramiro Espinoza

Hi Jasper, Just be sure the kern feature is properly generated in the font. Then, some browsers will support it and others won't, but it is something beyond your reach. Some Safari versions are suposed to support kerning but they don't do it well. In my tests I could only make it work expanding the kerning and storing it in a old style table (not in the OT fea). You can generate this sort of duplicated kerning tables but it makes the webfont much heavier, I don't recommend it.

Ramiro Espinoza

http://typedrawers.com/discussion/275/support-of-the-kern-feature-in-safari

Jasper de Waard

@Ramiro: Haha, I just came across that thread by accident. I'll take your word for it and keep it simple