Kerning Issues

FontCreator - Font Editor FontCreator - Support
1

Hello:

I just recently got FontCreator two weeks ago, so I apologize in advance for my ignorance. :slight_smile:

Here’s the deal – I created images for a font. i sent it to my friend who uses FontCreator, and he made the font for me. He sent back a completed font from the images I gave him, and suggested that if I wanted to make changes and continue in this endeavor, I get FontCreator. I did.

I only have the Home Edition, so no AutoKerning, although i would get it in a heartbeat if it would solve my problem.

Here’s the deal – I was concerned about the kerning – some words like “To” are as FAR apart as “TH”. I went into “Kerning” and I see 18 pairs that are ALREADY included. Weird ones like “fw” and “df”. My friend is Spanish, so maybe his initial work on this is why! :slight_smile: So I started adding some new “kern pairs” and i was doing fine. I just didn’t know how to get them into the font. I clicked “export” and it brought up a file for me to save it as, a .TXT file (???) I do not know how kerning is “attached” to a font’s memory, per se. So I hit “save” and saved the “.txt” file. In the PREVIEW window, my font kerns correctly now.

BUT, when i installed the font in Photoshop Elements, the kerning that I paired did not work. I would be inclined to say that PSE does not support kerning, as it will not let you change the kerning in general – BUT the 18 kerning pairs that were ALREADY IN THERE did work. They were kerning correctly. So somehow it IS working. But only for those 18 pairs.

So how is it that these pre-existing 18 pairs are kerning correctly, and the ones I did are not? Did I not save correctly? How do you install a “txt” file to a font? How does that info get into the font itself, is what I am asking? When I exported the kerning pairs I did, and it saved as a “txt” file, what was I supposed to do with that? Because it’s not with the font, as far as I can tell. :-/

Much appreciation in advance.

2

The idea of exporting kerning pairs as a text file is to reuse the same values in another font, or as a backup of all that hard work.

If you import a text file, you will find a couple of default text files ready to use with your font. The values won’t be right for your font, but it may give you a head start.

Autokerning in the Pro Edition does help, but one often needs to do a lot of manual tweaking anyway. On small fonts, the Home Edition is OK for occasional use. Learn to use the keyboard for much faster manual kerning.

If you want me to look at your font and test it, attach it to the forum.

3

OK. Thank you very much in advance. I will attach the font to this post.

Tell me if the kerning is working for “To” and “Ta”. I did not yet kern “Ti” and “Te” yet, so you can tell if it is working, IF the kerning is different on To and Ta, as opposed to Te and Ti.

If the kerning is working, then it is a Photoshop Elements issue…but as I said, when i typed in a few weird combinations on PSE (from the 18 pairs that were somehow pre-loaded), the kerning worked. So it SHOULD work with MY pairs. :frowning: But currently it is not. :frowning:

In the “preview” window on Creator, my kerning of To and Ta works, BTW.

Thanks,
Brent
Morality Bites (To Use).ttf (13.4 KB)

4

The kerning of Ta and To works for me.

The font contains OpenType glyph positioning data GPOS for kerning. Photoshop Elements is apparently able to use this but not your kerning.

You could try deleting the unsupported GPOS table in Format Tables, Unsupported tables. Then maybe PhotoShop will find the other kerning values. Just guessing here, so keep a backup copy.

The other possibility is that you haven’t uninstalled and reinstalled the font successfully.

5

Thank you very much. I am continuing to try and manually adjust the rest of my kerning pairs. I saw on here a few days ago a post that had a list of common kerning pairs…but now i cannot find it. Does anyone know what post I am referring to? It was in this forum, I believe. I tried to search for it, but no luck.

It was a list of about 50-100 kerning pairs…the big ones that everyone uses. :slight_smile:

Thanks so much,
Brent

6

Hello there!

I just wanted to let you know that it WAS the unsupported GPOS tables that needed deleted! Now, Photoshop Elements is picking up the kerning! THANK YOU SO MUCH!!! :slight_smile:

I would never have thought to delete something like an unsupported GPOS table – I would be too afraid!

thanks again!
Brent

7

:slight_smile:

8

Here’s a set of 521 kerning pairs which has three groups: Cap-Cap, Cap-LC, LC-LC. Can be selected in AutoKerning. Does not include numbers, special punctuation or accented letters.
Kerning Pairs - column.txt (2.02 KB)

9

I may have deleted mine, but if you use the Import Text button on the Manual Kerning dialogue, you should find two predefined kerning files — kern_standard.txt and kern_extended.txt.

The two attached files are from FontCreator 5.6 — for FontCreator 6.1 they go in the %AppData%\FontCreator\ folder.
Kern_standard.txt (4.77 KB)
Kern_extended.txt (34.1 KB)

10

I was just looking at my predefined kerning files — kern_standard.txt and kern_extended.txt.

They date back to 2003.
I almost remember there being updates (other than the one offered by Dick Pape in 2010) but can’t find them.
Perhaps I am confabulating them with composites which I know have been updated.

My question is: Are the 2003 versions still the best out there?

11

They are only a list of default kerning pairs, to give you a head start. Almost certainly you will need to edit individual values to suit the font that you’re creating, to support the glyphs that it includes.

Export the resulting pairs to a new kerning pairs file for that regular type style. Then import than into the italic type style, tweak it again to suit the italic glyphs, and export again. Import that into the bold and bold italic styles, tweak those again, and you have a set of four text files for one font.

The next font you create will be different, and will need different kerning values. If your fonts usually support the same range of characters, then it may save you some time to reuse your first four kerning pair text files next time.

12

I’m having the same sort of problem as the initial poster here, except that nothing that I’ve tried, nor the help files, or any of the suggestions that people have made here in this thread, seems to be helping me at all.

Basically, I have a font that just refuses to kern at all! I’m using FontCreator 5.6 Professional. What I did was I started with a handwriting font (of my own handwriting) that I’d first created back in 2001 using Macromedia Fontographer. I was reasonably happy with it, and it was nicely kerned and everything, but there were some contour errors and other stuff that needed cleaning up and a few other changes. In the process of doing these latter, and just to finally get a little experience with FontCreator (after having had it for a couple of years now but not having really used it yet) I thought I’d re-create my original font from scratch. Copying/pasting the glyphs into their new slots was no problem, but I just can’t seem to get the kerning to do anything – AT ALL! If I do auto-kerning, then it just doesn’t seem to do anything when I test out the font, and nor does manual kerning. As the original poster of this thread mentioned, a particularly big issue seems to be the uppercase T with any adjacent letters – even when I can “see” that it’s there in the kerning, it just doesn’t actually show up when I go to use the installed font in any program (WordPerfect, Photoshop, or anything else).

For the life of me, I have no idea what I’m doing wrong. If you’d like, if you think it’ll help to see them, I could post both my original font (created in Fontographer back in 2001) as well as this new, problematic version.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions!

Ron :slight_smile:

13

The edited font would be a great help. If it works here, then we know that it must be the application that doesn’t recognise the kerning.

14

Hmm… it would seem that I can only upload one attachment here, so I zipped up both the old and new versions of my font into one zip file and attached that. “Falsum” is the original font that I created back in 2001, using Fontographer, and which I’d kerned and everything to my reasonable satisfaction, but which I then just recently “cleaned up” with regard to various things like overlapping contours and stuff. I didn’t change the kerning or anything, though, and please note that the kerning DOES work just fine, showing up in all my applications, including MainType, WordPerfect and Photoshop.

“Nova Falsum” is the new version of my font, which I created in FontCreator by essentially making a “new” font file, then copying/pasting each/every character from the old font into the new template (creating additional glyphs as needed). I then ran auto-kerning (and auto-metrics) on everything, and also did some manual kerning (on the uppercase “T”), however kerning DOES NOT show up in various apps, not even in MainType(!), nor in WordPerfect, although it does show up in Photoshop.

So it’s not an issue with the app not being able to display kerning, it’s something about how Fontographer did kerning (which obviously works just fine, regardless of app) and how FontCreator does it (which seems really quite temperamental). Unless there’s something I’m just not doing, or not doing correctly, in FontCreator?

Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!

Ron :slight_smile:
falsum.zip (65.9 KB)

15

I have tried it out, and the kerning seems to work fine using Open Office. Admitedly, a lot of the kerning needs some help, as you can see from the word “don’t” in the screenshot, below. As a general rule, you never want a character to kern completely into the the advance width of another one, leading to leftover negative kerning with the character on the other side. Below, the apostrophe gets melded so far into the “t” that the normal spacing of “n” + “t” gets eaten by inadequate “n” + apostrophe spacing.

Oh, and Simon, you can upload multiple files, but you can’t do it in a batch. One at a time, only.

-Van
falsum.png

16

Thanks for the reply, Van! Um, with the issue you pointed out (along with the example you showed), which font were you using? The first/old font I created I pretty well manually kerned completely, but the second/new one was mainly just auto-kerned.

I still don’t understand why the old font (created in Fontographer) kerns just fine in pretty well any program, but the new one (created in FontCreator) only seems to have kerning show up in some (but not all) programs.

ALSO, on a separate – but somewhat related – note, I don’t quite get what the “Test…” thing is for in FontCreator (i.e. under Font → Test, or F5). I mean, sure, I can look at my font, but kerning doesn’t even seem to show up in there, either! So what is it that I’m supposedly testing for in there?

17

You put the cart before the horse in trying to fix the spacing problems by using kerning.

I suggest removing all of the kerning pairs, and fixing the spacing first before testing the font in the font test window using some text samples from Kern King

What I did with the attached version, was to strip all of the kerning pairs, then fix the spacing on some letters like: A, F, G, I, J, K, M, N, P, T, V, W, Y, d, f, i, l, p, s, t, u, v, w, y, and apostrophe. It was just a quick and rough job, but the spacing should be better than before.

One trick to use is to use the Comparison toolbar (F11) in the Glyph Edit Window, with the Before and After glyphs both set to capital N. Fix the width of that first, then run through the font using the Alt Left/Right cursor keys to see where the main spacing problems lie.

Move some glyphs to the left or right, and adjust the right side-bearing of other glyphs to reduce the advance width. After adjusting the spacing, the Font Test window will show you some problem areas where glyphs clash.

Only after fixing the spacing, use the Manual Kerning dialogue to fix any remaining problem pairs, like AY or F, etc.

This screen shot shows the capital F, for which I adjusted the right side-bearing.
Falsum F.png
Falsum Regular.ttf (39.4 KB)

18

Wow, thank you, Bhikkhu! Looks like I have my work cut out for me. I was new to this using Fontographer a decade ago, and I’m still new to this a decade later (I basically just put aside all font stuff during those intervening years!).

In any case it would seem that I pretty well need to start almost from the beginning again (as far as spacing/kerning goes), but will this somehow resolve that weird issue with regard to the kerning not showing up in various programs? As I mentioned, the kerning in my old Fontographer-designed font works fine in everything, but the new FontCreator-designed font only worked in just one program (Photoshop) and nothing else. Is that issue related, somehow, to my needing to resolve this other issue that you were talking about here?

Thanks again for your help! Might take me a little while to get it done, but I will! :slight_smile:

19

I was using Nova, and I don’t ever really use the Test (F5) option, other than to get a good feel for color. For kerning, metrics and the like, I use the View:Toolbars:Preview window to see how things work out. And obviously, there are some issues that arose from the auto-kerning, but I really like to use the auto-kern to give me my list of pairs, which I can then fiddle with to get good results. Even though I wouldn’t move a comma or period as far under the bar of an “F” as the auto-kerning did with your font, I would still want to give them a little tuck under there.