Fontlab studio 5 kerning
So the left sidebearings of OCGQ and the right sidebearing of D are all usually either the same or very close.ĭesigning even spacing is about keeping a relatively consistent amount of white space between letters. Consistency means the “same” elements should get the same space across different glyphs, and similar elements spaced similarly. Decent spacing is consistent, and follows certain general principles about shapes. But many junk fonts don’t even get the basics right, and that is easily detected. In high-end type design, spacing is an especially complex art and craft. The total horizontal space allocated to a glyph is its “advance width.” The distances between the furthest extent of each side of the glyph and the ends of the allocated space are the “sidebearings”-which can even be negative numbers, if part of a glyph sticks into a neighboring space. In fonts, each glyph is placed in a slot with a certain amount of space allocated to it, which generally includes white space on either side. So I thought I would post something here for general public consumption, and point to it from my latest Kickstarter update. It is also the final major production task in type design.Īs I am finishing this stage on the Regular style of my Kickstarter typeface Cristoforo, and about to send updated fonts to my backers, I find myself needing to explain what this kerning business is, anyway. This is done by placing a base glyph anchor on the diacritic.Adding kerning is one of the very most tedious tasks in developing a font, if it is done well. In the case of the umlaut, that looks like this: u_umlaut = u + stackingįinally, to attach multiple diacritics above or below a character, you simply need to adjust the location of the appropriate anchor. What this means for you is that, in your recipe, you have to follow the diacritic's name with an character and the name of the anchor to align to. It turns out that a diacritic is allowed to have multiple possible attachment points (presumably so combining acute above and combining acute below, etc., didn't have to be different glyphs), and rather than attempt to programmatically decide which one to default to, the FontLab devs appear to have simply forced you to always write it out explicitly.
Unfortunately, this is exactly how you get -aligned overlaid characters. You type in a "recipe" like tengwar_nde = tengwar_nd + tengwar_e and check the "Use Auto Layers" box and it will generate the glyph for you.
#Fontlab studio 5 kerning manual#
Proper glyph generation (not in the manual)Īs the manual says, generating precomposed glyphs is handled by the Generate Glyphs window Ctrl+Alt+G. Unfortunately, if you try this according to the manual, it will not respect the anchors and instead just align the two characters by their respective vectors.
This allows the program to treat the anchors as a joint at which to combine the two glyphs. Then, you will have to name the anchor on the combining glyph the same name, but preceded by an underscore, as in _umlaut. Give the anchor on the base glyph a name, like umlaut. But for the program to know precisely what to look up, it needs the names to follow a certain pattern. In other words, it's a dictionary entry that allows you to look up a vector with a string (name). Press Ctrl+Alt+Shift+R to insert an anchor. The manual, unfortunately, is currently largely useless for telling you how this is used. Per the manual, base glyphs and accents are attached using "anchors," named coordinates on the glyph that provide information on where to place the glyph.