
How should one adjust the spacing between these Czech and Slovak glyphs and whatever letter follows them? It's easy enough to tuck an x-height glyph a bit beneath the háček (caron) to even out the letter spacing. However, how should one kern the following glyph when it has an ascender?
I've noticed that most supposedly higher-quality fonts don't bother, leaving way too much space or having the ascender crash into the háček. Is there some Czech/Slovak convention I'm missing or am I just noticing inattention to detail in those fonts?
Comments
ďa ďä ďe ďě ďi ďo ďǒ ďu ďk ďA ďI ďO ďU ď' ď" ď” ď“ ď! ď? ď) ď] ď} ď*
ťa ťi ťo ťu ťk ťA ťI ťO ťU ť" ť” ť“ ť! ť? ť) ť] ť} ť*
Ľa Ľi Ľo Ľk Ľu ĽA ĽI ĽO ĽU ĽT ĽV Ľ' Ľ” Ľ“ Ľ! Ľ? Ľ) Ľ} Ľ] Ľ*
It’s not like kerning an apostrophe in it’s.
And as I often advise, swipe appropriate-language text from a newspaper and try out different options in your prototype.
OK then, not hearsay, but a quickly sourced example!
We may both be right Adam, with factors like weight and point size playing a role too.
By “plenty of sidebearing” I meant be wary of making a negative sidebearing which encroaches into the accent.
Who amongst us would not be sorely tempted to kern the above?
I might have mentioned that it’s also a good practice to put the háček extremely close to the letter.
So how about this as a best practice:
The advance width of a letter should be the same with and without the vertical háček.
But positive kerning may be added when the háček-accented character is followed by an ascender (and exclam, question, quote, parenthesis, etc.)
That’s a lot of characters to put in a kerning class, but if one were to make the accented character wider, one would still have to make a large (negative) kerning class of x-height characters and punctuation anyway.
This method will fail when there is no kerning support (where ever the vertical háček is followed by an ascender etc.), more badly than the gappy alternative, but kerning is near universal these days.
In very bold weights, it may also be necessary to add positive kerning when followed by an x-height character, so the háček doesn’t look like it’s above that character. Therefore, to avoid this, and having to create both negative and positive kerning classes, make the accented character width wider, according to it being followed by an x-height character.
***
- lcaron/dcaron’s advance width should ignore the mark;
- try designing the mark in a way that avoids collapsing with lowercase letters (except the ascending ones);
- kern the letters with ascenders (ďk, etc) and do leave the ugly giant gap that you probably don’t like. From my [not very extensive though] research, that gap is expected.
Also, an interesting treatment example:
On this channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUPgmAhUy6NkMxzRTmks55w and elsewhere, including grammars and textbooks, I have seen the hacek written out as a free floating caron on the right-hand side of the /l and the /t. It has been my personal experience in our profession, that the form of some of the diacritics in some languages is not strictly ortographycally codified. It seems that the more important thing is that there is some sort of additional mark, often simplified, on the letter to distinguish it from its other variants. E.g., in Slovak, the -t' is the ending of verb infinitives.The mark distinguishes it from its hard variant, the /t. We had a similar discussion I remember about the cedilla some time ago on the board - in handwriting it is often simplified to a simple stroke.
Attached are some examples from a personal copy of a Bulgarian 1975 Czech (Not Slovak!) textbook
I definitely believe this, so all other things being equal, I prefer @Adam Jagosz’s solution—because the effect of things that are missed is a significantly less severe problem, in my book.
Conflicting criteria must be resolved in a way that is both efficient and attractive.
Fonts are like gigantic puzzles.