I would appreciate to know if there are any errors I have done while setting sidebearings for my glyphs. I would also like to know if left and right columns are balanced and not too dark on either side. The colums are test words from Emil Ruder and Niggli, Imprint of Braun Publishing AG, Switzerland.
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BTW to quickly show spacing quality you can use a short phrase that has every letter in the middle of a word. I favor this thing I once concocted:
https://github.com/davelab6/pangrams/blob/gh-pages/metagrams.md
On the other side, I would say that spacing for capitals is significantly tighter than it's usual. Not sure what is the intended purpose of the font (text or display), because some display fonts intentionally go for obviously tight spacing. But given that the font is lighter than the standard "Regular" (the lighter weight the bigger spacing should be) and looking by its design I would expect bigger spacing for caps.
The problem with too tight spacing is that it keeps unsolvable gaps like "TV" for example. You can make side bearings 0 and still have a very obvious gap if the rest is too tight, kerning can't help you unless to overlap letters.
A –potentially– relevant parallel here: when fashion magazines horizontally squoosh photos of their models (to make them look thinner, which stinks of course) they can go down to 97% without people thinking "this is not a human". Although again, if this does apply it applies [more] to display than text.
@Igor Petrovic I've sometimes implemented such "asymmetry", because it saves effort without a marked loss in quality.
These differences are minor and hard to notice, but if you're trying to produce a professional quality font, you'll need to fix them.
I have made adjustment to uppercase glyphs and made S much less looser. Thanks for pointing out S glyph. I am still not sure if I glyph requires more spacing.
I am a begginer in type design and used book titled "Designing Type" to learn all principles. One of them is a way of setting sidebearings.
This particular design is actually relatively easy to space well, but it's a bit of a pain to untangle which glyph needs what and do a thorough job without a good test phrase... Could you please provide that?
Now compare the asymmetry in the "M' with the right sides of "c" and "e". Three units, versus one unit? That can't make sense, since the difference in the latter is much more pronounced... If you go with a coarser grain, the "M" would be symmetrical, and the "e" might have one unit more than the "c" (maybe two). Much easier to wrap one's head around, and only –some– type designers might complain. :-)
Fun fact. As I edit in FontLab 7 in my metrics tab units of e and c on the right are the same. only in metrics panel it is different. Im curious if you experience the same thing as you work on your projects.
For example, if you pick 50% of the H counter as a value for side bearing for H then it makes sense to pick 50% of the n counter as the value for n sidebearing. Because the H counter is bigger than the n counter, hence sidebearing will be as well.
Somebody already mentioned the other problem, and that is: spacing of capitals will work well in "ALL CAPS" or in the "Title Case" setting. Can't work well for both (in theory). If it works for the "ALL CAPS" setting then spacing between the first (capital) letter and the next (lowercase) letter in "Title Case" looks too big.
This can be solved by adding the OpenType feature which makes letter-spacing bigger when ALL CAPS is used. But more often you pick the side bearings for caps which are somewhat bigger than for lowercase but still look acceptable in "Title Case"
Later on in the project I plan to make true low capitals. In other words custom glyphs and apply lowercase letter measurements for width of stems as well as sidebearings. Is it a good way of approaching this problem?
One broad piece of advice: how tight or loose the spacing should be overall depends somewhat on the intended usage size. Pick a specific size that you want the spacing to be ideal for, and accept that users may need to track it a bit in other situations. If you space it well for 10 pt text, it will look noticeably too loose at 48+ pt—and that is OK and even a good sign.
Your eyegauge is the arbiter... simple as that.
I say look because there are many little ways to twist that. Mathematically correct spacing might look worse than what your heart tells you. You are an artist, not a scientist doing calculations.