Scanahand 3 - a little underwhelmed.

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Timo Kähkönen
Posts: 46
Joined: Mon Aug 11, 2008 11:05 am
Location: Finland

Re: Scanahand 3 - a little underwhelmed.

Post by Timo Kähkönen »

I went through all the 2266 pairs and adjusted manually all pairs which seemed to be bad kerned.

Here is the result:
http://www.royalcomics.org/puhekupla/ma ... justed.pdf

And here in uppercase, because this is more readable and flaws can be seen easier:
http://www.royalcomics.org/puhekupla/ma ... _upper.pdf

What thoughts?
Timo Kähkönen
Posts: 46
Joined: Mon Aug 11, 2008 11:05 am
Location: Finland

Re: Scanahand 3 - a little underwhelmed.

Post by Timo Kähkönen »

iKern is a tool that has been onscreen so much, so here is a comparation between Igino Marini's iKern and Adobe's Optical Kerning:
http://www.royalcomics.org/puhekupla/iK ... ptical.pdf

Sample 3 in this PDF is nearly acceptable without kerning, because it's spacing (sidebearings) are made by Igino Marini with his iKern.

Sample 4 is complex case. To be comparable with sample 3, I made the font again. I printed characters on template (with my own template editor) and inputted those to Scanahand and generated new font. From sample 4 you can see, how Scanahand calculates spacing (HSB and LSB). The difference to iKern spaced font (sample 3) is huge.

Because of flaws on some letter pairs it is almost unusable as such. For example, "ATAIF" seems to be "AT AIF" => This means Scanahand should have better horizontal autospacing.

Despite it's horizontal spacing flaws, Scanhand makes excellent results what it comes to autotracing glyphs (compare glyphs on sample 3 and 4, they are almost similar, which was my purpose). And the process lasted only few minutes!

Scanahand is king, when there is proper autospacing and kerning and of course possibility to print sample glyphs.
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