Autokerner: free spacing and kerning for FontLab 8, all masters in one run

Igor Petrovic · November 1

This sounds like an important tool for small independent creators. Especially for those who work by the font versioning model. Real manual kerning is an investment (time or money) that many small type designers can't afford. This way the font can start earning earlier.

Regarding AI, this is the exact area where I would expect and welcome its use, while keeping it far away from the design part.

Thanks @pavljenko for sharing your effort with us. I hope you will find time to develop it further.

Nick Shinn · November 1

Real manual kerning is an investment (time or money) that many small type designers can't afford.

That’s sad. I’ve always enjoyed the meditative quality of manual kerning.
And isn’t manual kerning where one really becomes intimate with how all the characters of one’s concept fit together?
The most stressful, time-consuming, unproductive part of being a “small” type designer, for me, is naming typefaces. Anybody come up with an app for that yet?

Robin Mientjes · November 2

Perhaps this is off-topic.

Even the largest kerning jobs in my career have not taken more than perhaps two solid days per source. When the kerning is important enough to take that many hours – display type with open-ended needs, for example – I think that means it’s worth doing the work. Kerning is a revision round in itself, to me. I know that’s not an orthodoxy – we’re told to finish everything before we even think about kerning – but that is a rigid way of thinking. There’s always a bit of back and forth. Sometimes I end up changing entire glyph designs during kerning. Not often! But it just happened two weeks ago. The side-by-side of every glyph to every glyph is a great opportunity to get to know your design just a little bit more, and see what fits. So even if the kerning was automated, I’d still want to go over it. Revision is the work. Writing is editing. Practice makes perfect. And all those chestnuts.

Autokerner: free spacing and kerning for FontLab 8, all masters in one run

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