Character Spacing

[Erwin Denissen]

One of the beta testers requested options for character spacing:

Would an option to specify the "character spacing" be useful?

I could for example provide these options for character spacing:
Script (LSB -20, RSB -20) (for connected characters)
Condensed (LSB 30, RSB 40)
Normal (LSB 60, RSB 80) <-- this is how Scanahand sets the bearings right now
Extended (LSB 90, RSB 120)

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

It would be more useful to let users enter values for left and right bearings if the default setting is not satisfactory. The dialogue could offer a droplist with sensible presets, but would also allow entry of any value.

[Timo Kähkönen]

The feature that lacks nearly all the font programs in the market is horizontal spacing calculation that is based on glyph outline shape.

If the autokerning feature is hard work to code, how about character LSB/RSB (left/right side "margin") calculation?

In practice this means that for example I has wider horizontal margin than O. And when characters (e.g. I and O) has optimized horizontal metrics there is no so much need for kerning them with kerning pairs. Some font's glyphs has such shape that kerning pairs are totally unnecessary, but this is very rare.

Automatic horizontal metrics calculation would be great feature and it CAN be calculated automatically. The best examples are:
- iKern, http://www.ikern.com
iKern vs. Adobe Optical Kerning
http://www.typophile.com/node/10317
- Adobe CS/2/3 Indesign/Illustrator/Photoshop Optical Kerning

iKern is a Igino Marini's kerning service that is based on his iKern program. It costs 100 EUR per font and 300 EUR per font-family of four fonts. The spacing and kerning result is excellent but as manual service it is fairly expensive (vs. feature rich professional font editors cost 400-800 EUR).

Hopefully this program is coming to sale some day because most average font designers (Scanahand users) are not capable of paying 600 EUR of spacing and kerning of two font families.

Adobe Optical Kerning is also nearly as excellent as iKern, but spacing and kerning calculation with it is slow because of processing speed of its scripting features. But it's possible and finding kerning values this way takes about 7 minutes, when we iterates through 6000 letter pairs. I made a script for Illustrator and step-by-step instructions: http://forum.high-logic.com/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=2969#p15175

[Timo Kähkönen]

Scanahand 4.0 is out now and the features can be seen here: http://www.high-logic.com/font-generator/scanahand/release-history.html.

The enhancements from previous version (3.1) seems to be minor, but I had the opportunity to see a glimpse of the new very promising spacing algorithm, which did not come without great effort of High-Logic personnel.

The newsletter of Scanahand 4.0 said that "This version includes a brand new algorithm for calculating the optimal amount of space before and after each character within the basic Latin character set." And I heard that this new version calculates only LSB/RSB, not kerning pairs or classes.

This is fine for some portion of user base, but we in northern Europe are in need of proper spacing/kerning calculation of extended character sets (ÅÄÖÆØ etc.) and my Russian friends appreciate also АБВГДЕЖЗИЙ etc (Правильно я говорю, мой друг?).

I understand that the development work was huge, but why to stop here?

When we finally get a Scanahand which produces fonts that are USABLE AS SUCH - without need of producing spacing and kerning in other programs and without need to send fonts to professional spacing firms (eg. Igino Marini iKern)?

My suggestion is to skip this 4.0, which should have named 3.2 because of it's support for spacing is so limited. Of course if basic Latin is enough for you, then 4.0 is for you.

We are waiting the next version.