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.
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.
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:
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>.
Comments
I didn’t know that, I certainly didn’t put them there!
pos P V <24> <0>;
pos f asterisk <48> <0>;
pos f question <72> <0>;
}
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>;
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>.