Page 1 of 1

Kerning Pairs

Posted: Sun Feb 27, 2011 9:28 pm
by Lesley Prince
Of the many difficulties I've encountered creating fonts is the question of spacing and kerning. No matter how carefully I think I've examined my font, there are always some nasty surprises when I actually use it in a real setting. To help I have created a word document with all kerning pairs using Upper and Lower Case letters and Numerals. I haven't bothered with the special characters (yet). I am attaching it here in case it may be of some use to others. It is quite a long document, but it is flexible, and although some of the pairings are highly unlikely I have not presumed to decide in advance which should be excluded. It is in docx and doc formats, and is completely editable. If anyone wants one in another format I will be happy to supply it if I can.
Regards
Lesley Prince

Re: Kerning Pairs

Posted: Sun Feb 27, 2011 11:10 pm
by Bhikkhu Pesala
Plain text format is best.

There are some test files at Kern King that you may find useful.

Kerning and spacing is one of the most time-consuming tasks, and one of the most difficult to get right. Months after uploading my updated Pali font, I am still tweaking the kerning pairs after coming across pairs that look too tight when editing my books. I always seem to err on the side of making them too tight.

I hope one day we will get improvements to auto-kerning.

Re: Kerning Pairs

Posted: Mon Feb 28, 2011 12:25 pm
by Lesley Prince
Hello again Bikkhu. I also seem to get the spacing too tight, but occasionally come across a pair that seem miles away from each other. Thank you for your advice. I have produced a version of the test document in RTF and also taken the opportunity to edit it slightly as well so that it occupies only 7 pages instead of the original 20 odd.
Best wishes
Lesley

Re: Kerning Pairs

Posted: Mon Feb 28, 2011 4:10 pm
by Dick Pape
Here are three documents which can be used to test or display kerning issues.
kerning test01.txt
(12.63 KiB) Downloaded 1011 times
kerning test02.txt
(2.8 KiB) Downloaded 863 times
kerning test03.txt
(11.18 KiB) Downloaded 847 times