Any good resource material for kerning in FL or in general about kerning pairs but for
beginners? I somewhat understand how classes work in FL to some degree but not enough to take advantage of anything else FL can do wrt kerning as I haven't gotten there yet & I'm hoping to get some info on other methods. Also is kerning affected based on the text size or is that something to do with the display? What I mean is like say if you go into kerning mode & start kerning at a text size of 128, but somewhere in between if you decided to change text size to say 24 or something then it starts to look very different which I think is expected as it may look tighter at small sizes. But the weird thing is even for shapes that are similar and have the same kerning value, one may end up looking tighter than the other when you switch text sizes, however the larger the text size the more accurate they look as intended. link to
[gif] as an example, at 36, the first NH vs the 2nd NH look different in spacing though they have the same value but as I size it up it starts to look more uniform & similar.
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Also, from your GIF it seems you're using kerning where you should be using spacing instead. BEFORE you even think about kerning (the yellow fields), it's important that your spacing (the white fields above the yellow fields) is spot on. Good luck!
And I should add that I don't mean this acceptance in my usual nihilistic sense. Rather, I mean to explain that just because one can cram 6,000 kerns into every font does not make doing so meritorious, and liberating oneself from the notion of kerning everything will be beneficial to future sanity.
I would suggest, as a beginner, to ignore classes anyway. Go through all the major combinations: Uppercase to uppercase, lowercase to lowercase, uppercase to lowercase, figures to figures, uppercase to punctuation, lowercase to punctuation, figures to punctuation. This takes FOREVER and can be unpleasant, but it helps you to internalize the patterns of a typeface on a whole other level. You'll make mistakes that help you to remember what to look for in the future, when you do rely on classes.
@Jasper de Waard ah okay, thanks for clearing that up. Also yeah I kept the sidebearings at 0 because what I was working on needed to be kept very close and felt I could just instead kern it but I see your point though, thanks! @Dyana Weissman I've been doing exactly that and when I crossed 700 pairs or something I realised I had to get this cleared up because I felt it was just a painstaking inefficient process and that there might things you guys know to do it more efficiently and less time consuming. Classes are kinda nice, I only played with it a little bit but I'm taking note of what you said, Cheers! @Terminal Design that's very interesting what Ed Benguiat said, I never thought of it as 3s, but that totally makes sense.
There where some comments about the importance of kerning. I like to add one more: Up until the 70ties, maybe even later, there was no kerning at all in reading sizes and only really in headlines. I don't saying that you should not kern at all but make sure that font works without it.
If I look at the original Macintosh Type 1 version of FF Thesis for example, then TheSans Plain (224 glyphs) has more than 3,400 kerning pairs. For those days (early 1990s) that level of detailing was quite unprecedented, but also demonstrated what could be done with digital type.
While I agree that the goal should be to make as little kerning pairs as possible, I do think it is very helpful to start kerning the basic combinations, and go through all of them manually. It takes a while, but you will gain a lot of insight. With every new typeface after that you will recognise easier which combinations might need kerning, or (even better!) which shapes can be drawn differently to avoid kerning.
But I got some fonts from users that had even more pairs including classes. So you never know.
Like Frode said, how extensive your kerning pair lists are is also a big factor. I've settled on a default list somewhat recently for each master of lower to lower, upper to lower (includes mirrored lower to upper), upper to upper, upper to appropriate numerals, lower to appropriate numerals, upper to punctuation, lower to punctuation, upper/lower/numerals to enclosers, numerals to numerals, punctuation to punctuation, numerator/denominator to fraction, and all diacritic collisions. The above naturally includes any case sensitive forms, alternates, lining figures, old style figures, and small caps.