Autokern non-latin glyphs

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Sergei
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Autokern non-latin glyphs

Post by Sergei »

Making autokern, but it seems that it works only for latin.
How to autokern Cyrillic?
Thanks!
PJMiller
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Re: Autokern non-latin glyphs

Post by PJMiller »

Autokern only does Latin. If you want to kern Cyrillic then you have to manually kern them.

There is a problem inherent in auto kerning other characters, there are a lot of them and if you auto kerned all characters then you would end up with enormous tables. The number of kerning pairs goes up proportional to the square of the number of characters kerned.

Most of the pairs in the table would be useless, kerning between Hebrew characters and Ethiopian characters for instance or between Cyrillic and Georgian, or between Runes and Roman numerals.

But I do think the current situation could be improved by setting Kerning groups and being able to kern within the groups but not between them.
Last edited by PJMiller on Tue Nov 29, 2016 6:45 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Bhikkhu Pesala
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Re: Autokern non-latin glyphs

Post by Bhikkhu Pesala »

Defining Kerning Classes is definitely the best method. Autokern on the Tools menu can be used on a new font without any OpenType pair adjustment lookups to generate kerning pairs for Latin.

Other scripts will need their own kerning tables.

Once your font has a lookup table, you can use Autokern in the Visual OpenType Designer to Autokern and generate the kerning pair values.
Autokern.png
Autokern.png (29.17 KiB) Viewed 4780 times
You can also let FontCreator generate Kerning Classes for you, but I prefer to create my own, then reuse them by importing scripts into other fonts.
Class Manager.png
Class Manager.png (20.81 KiB) Viewed 4780 times
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Sergei
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Re: Autokern non-latin glyphs

Post by Sergei »

Thank you for help.
I already have Cyrillic + Latin + Number pairs for Fontlab autokerning http://lemonad.livejournal.com/74426.html
Maybe I can use them in FontCreator?
Bhikkhu Pesala
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Re: Autokern non-latin glyphs

Post by Bhikkhu Pesala »

That list is not very well designed as there are a lot of pairs there that won't need kerning.

There's no automatic method that I know of, but maybe you can find a work-around by copying the list to the Notes Toolbar (F2) for your font project.
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MikeW
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Re: Autokern non-latin glyphs

Post by MikeW »

One can make use of a text editor capable of find/replace to separate the letters/characters and insert a tab, copy into Excel, bring back into the text editor for replacing the tabs.

This doesn't take long once one has done it a couple times. I have attached the Cyrillic pairs from that page. Just create the kern feature, open the code for it, and paste this in between the appropriate place. I used Zero values so one would need to run the autokern.

Mike
Last edited by MikeW on Tue Nov 29, 2016 6:02 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Autokern non-latin glyphs

Post by Bhikkhu Pesala »

MikeW wrote:One can make use of a text editor capable of find/replace to separate the letters/characters and insert a tab, copy into Excel, bring back into the text editor for replacing the tabs.

This doesn't take long once one has done it a couple times. I have attached the Cyrillic pairs from that page. Just create the kern feature, open the code for it, and paste this in between the appropriate place. I used Zero values so one would need to run the autokern.

Mike
Will that work? Doesn't the kern table need glyph names or code-points, not characters?
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MikeW
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Re: Autokern non-latin glyphs

Post by MikeW »

Oops. I was in a rush and was going to ask for a text file export (highlight the uni glyphs and paste the names in a text editor) and then finish it off.

I went to close Excel and quickly did the replacement without thinking. Thanks for catching that, BP.
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