![]() ![]() Kerning is applied in both positive and negative amounts and is measured in fractions of an em ( one em is equal to the type size of the currently used font). In most page layout application the kerning amounts are applied in one thousandths of an em increment. Basically, what I’m saying here is that these are not perfect and that the skill and experience of the type designer has a major impact on the quality of these kerning pairs. As you can imagine, this is an extremely tedious task-think about all the combinations of characters that could sit next to each other! Furthermore, these are based on mathematical calculations so that when you increase or decrease the type size, the spaces will be adjusted accordingly. ![]() What this means is that a decision has to be made regarding the distance between individual characters (the letters and symbols that make up a word) as they sit next to each other so that they appear evenly spaced. When a typeface is created one of the tasks the type designer has to complete (apart from drawing each character) is to create kerning values. Kerning is something that is often overlooked by many designers however, with only a few minutes work, adjustments to kerning can have a dramatic effect on the overall professionalism of a design- it’s all about attention to detail! So, let’s get started.įeatured Image: Kerning by Roni Weinsteinlicensed under CC BY-ND 3.0 What is Kerning? But you can try every function and will notice that the learning curve is not very steep, contrary to FontLab and FontForge.Īgain, NO, I do not have a financial interest in High Logic.Share In this month’s typography tutorial we explore kerning using InDesign. The one thing you can not do with the trial version is export te work file to an actual font. ![]() If you are serious about it plenty of time to experiment, I think. It is all very well explained in the manual and you have a trial period of 30 days. To prevent intersecting coordinates with some composites like AE ae OE oe and C-cedilla the components will have to be merged manually. They will automatically be correctly for capital letters. To get the accents correctly positioned above or under the character that needs that accent just position that accent-glyph on the correct vertical position for a lower case letter. Then just use the complete composites script. This script inserts the complete WGL4 character set, or Windows Glyph List 4 as defined by Microsoft to cover European Code Pages1250 (Eastern Europe), 1251 (Cyrillic), 1252 (ANSI), 1253 (Greek) and 1254 (Turkish). On the Extended Latin characters, Font Creator comes with several scripts to add these characters like the WGL4.0 Character Set. If you end up with many repeating corrections export the kerning text file and use the find/replace function of a text editor. Be aware, you will always need to check afterwards an do some corrections manually but when you have prepared well it should be minimal. Play the game a few times and it becomes a routine. With some trying you will find values that are reasonably close to your advance widths settings and get fewer and fewer kerning pairs, not much more than needed. Then, using AutoKern select the kerning pairs you want and experiment with the white space between characters and the minimum absolute kerning value. Instead of setting the bearings by hand you get a quicker and slightly better result using the Optical Metrics function. Then, apart from LT and so combinations, you have a reasonable starting point for AutoKerning. If you would choose for 60 em for an H or I go for 40 for an O shape and 20 for an A and so. The left and right bearings are not the same for every character specially for sans serifs. Important is that you first set your horizontal advance widths as accurate as possible. On autokern: Font Creator has that function and it works very well provided that you have done somethings well before you use it. I work with Font Creator so here my two cents.
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