![]() ![]() ![]() The space between these unkerned glyphs is 30, but visually that leaves a huge gap between the letters. The left and right side bearings can be adjusted numerically by typing values into a table at the bottom of the window.* The space between any two glyphs (in a left-to-right font) consists of the right side bearing of the left glyph added to the left side bearing of the right glyph. In this window, the user can type text into a box and have the corresponding glyphs of the font under development appear. The Background:įontForge has a convenient way to adjust letter spacing (tracking), called the Metrics Window. The problem seems to have been caused by my own enormous ignorance on the technical aspects of digital fonts and font editors, but I am sure that there are other amateur type designers outside who are likewise lacking in technical know-how. So when I had problems getting any kind of kerning to work, and procrastination (predictably) didn’t make the problems go away, I buckled down and finally came up with this. As far as I can find, the only help information available for FontForge is a few tutorials and an Issues site on GitHub, which is geared more towards fixing bugs and other software problems, not helping inexperienced users like me figure out how to do things. It often assumes you already have some expertise in the subject, which may not be the case. I love open-source software, but one of the downsides is that the help information available for it is sorely lacking, at least compared to commercial software. I’m writing this post for two reasons: so that I can look up the solution I figured out if I have this problem again, and so that if when someone else runs into the same problem, maybe they will find this on Google and be saved some grief. Tagged accented glyphs, Colosseum typeface, design process, diacritics, FontForge, kerning The other is … well, I’ll leave it to the user to find out.Īnd now (it’s never done, people, never ever done), back to kerning. One is an inside joke referencing Comic Sans. I’ve added a couple of “Easter eggs” in some of the slots for little-used glyphs. I must say that it is very, very satisfying to fill dozens of empty glyph slots this way.Īnd I cannot help but have some fun with this font. In a nutshell, the type designer needs only to design the base glyphs and the diactrics, then “build” each accented glyph with nothing more than the push of a button (literally: in FontForge, it’s CTRL-SHIFT-A). Designing all these glyphs one by one is a daunting task… but Unicode makes it easy through the use of combining diacritics. Not so in most other languages using the Latin alphabet: letters may be equipped with any of a whole menagerie of diacritics-sometimes with more than one on the same letter. For the most part, though, our letters are unadorned. We occasionally see them on words of foreign origin, such as the acute accent ´ on the é of café or the cedilla ¸ on the ç of façade. In rare cases (mostly archaic), the diaresis ¨ appears on English words like coöperate. ![]() In English, we rarely use diacritical marks. I haven’t got a reply yet but I am hoping people are just still busy at work. Here’s the meat of the email I sent this morning to the FontForge Users mailing list (yes, a mailing list apparently this is 1998), describing the problem. (Like Windows Movie Maker, FontForge has you work on a “project” that is saved in its own native file format generating a final video file or font file, respectively, is the last step of the project.) This was to be, of course, a “rough draft” of the final font, intended for use in kerning. I generated an OpenType font file from my FontForge project. (For the most part, I can either do what I need to do just using Windows Notepad… or I need more control than any word processor can provide, and jump right into Scribus, an advanced desktop publishing application.) I even downloaded Open Office, which I used a lot on my old laptop before I started using Google Docs for my occasional word processing needs. At this stage, it really needs to be looked at as a large block of text in a word processor. In FontForge, I can only work on a single line of text at a time. (That’s 1378 pairs.) I even kerned combinations that will probably never be used, like qm and kB. Oh, how I have kerning woes.Īll letter pairs have been kerned, for all 52 letters. ![]()
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