With 7.5 i could import a .txt file with all my specific premade kerning pairs simply listed in the txt file, then i could go through and manually adjust them and essentially fix the font to my liking.
With 8.0 i don’t see the option to import any existing pairs.
I am not an expert, just a newbie graphic designer but i really hate how bad the kerning is on some fonts and would rather fix the file than manually adjust them in photoshop.
Can anyone help me on how to import my old .txt file so i can get back my perfect list of kerning pairs.
I’m sure this could be possible because i really don’t want to use the ‘add’ - ‘new kerning pair’ manual option for 100’s of pairs when the old version had a nice import function.
If you open a font with kerning pairs, they will be imported into a kerning feature OpenType script.
Open the OpenType Designer, and select the lookup to see a list of the kerning pairs. This is the result after opening an old Bitstream Font from WordPerfect/CorelDraw that already had kerning pairs.
Right-click to automatically generate groups to reduce the workload of adjusting kerning pairs, or manually create your own groups.
If you carefully create a set of groups and kerning pairs for one font, you can export the script and import it into other fonts or styles of the same font. Autokern will then generate kerning pairs, leaving a minimal amount of work to fine-tune manual kerning of some awkward pairs like c hyphen.
There is a lot of new stuff to learn, but the old KERN tables are very limited compared to OpenType features, and the new group based kerning is much more efficient.
I attach a script with lots of groups and kerning pairs that you can import into any font. You will see an error dialogue like this about missing glyphs, but any existing glyphs in your font will be recognised.
Autokern will then generate kerning pairs for the predefined groups. The kerning pairs in the attached file are all zero — you need to run autokern to generate values to suit your font. Extract the ZIP archive to any suitable folder, and import the script into the OpenType Designer, overwriting any existing kerning features and lookups. This should give you a neat list of predefined groups to cover any Latin-based fonts.
After importing my script into the Bitstream font, all of the hard work is done already.
The kerning adjustments for each pair are calculated using Autokern.
The A_Caps Groups contains several A glyphs with accents, which all use the same value. The W is in a group of one for this font — in my fonts I have Ẃ, Ẅ etc., for Welsh.
The groups are logically named, and easy to find so that you can add more glyphs to them later if you add more accented characters to your font.
had a quick play, not enough time to do it all, but i think i’ve got a foothold into doing what i need.
I really just need to kern all the CAPS in this one font that is bothering me, so from what you’ve posted and 10mins of playing about i can create my own otlfd in text editor with the required pairs, import it into the opentype lookups, autokern them to get 90% of them done, and then adjust the really bad ones like AV AW AC etc…
btw…am i right in thinking the demo version will not export the ‘&’ or ‘$’ glyphs.
Yes. See the FAQ Sticky Thread at the top of this Support Forum.
I am curious to know why you consider the Autokern results for these pairs to be really bad? A screen shot of the autokerned pairs in your font would help. Do you think they are too tight or too loose? The Autokern settings can be adjusted from the default of 350 funits.
I guess i’m still thinking in terms of older/other software on which i’ve tried to correct kerning which has needed manual tweaks for some pairs.
To be honest in FC8 i didn’t get past creating my kerning pairs to see how good the autokern is - i was just theorizing as to how i could fix it the old fashioned way if all else failed.
I know the pro version has this optical metrics feature which might solve all my problems automatically. That would be impressive given how bad the uppercase kerning is on this font i’m trying to fix.
Optical metrics won’t create kerning pairs. What it does is optimise the left and right side-bearings of each glyph based on the white space between glyphs. While it should reduce the need for excessive kerning, pairs like LT, AV, Ta etc., will always need kerning on most fonts.
