I’ve enclosed a font I created with Scanahand; I can’t seem to get the Q to kern correctly no matter what I do with FontCreator; I think the problem is related to the large tail and FontCreator doesn’t seem to know how to kern such a glyph (or I don’t know how to handle correct kerning) I’ve tried auto-kerning, and also by adjusting Q and other paired glyphs.
rdcgaramond2.ttf (32 KB)
Bob
This is one of the limitations of Scanahand — it cannot get the spacing right if fonts have swashes.
In FontCreator you can edit the right side-bearing for the Q to make it negative — then create kerning pairs if you need them. It is debatable whether any font needs a kerning pair for QA — does it ever occur in English? QU still needs some kerning. Qu doesn’t need any, and the spacing to other characters is unlikely to be an issue because, again, those other combinations never (never say “never”) occur in English.
I attach the font with the corrected side-bearings for Q.
rdcgaramond2.zip (20.7 KB)
Bhikkhu,
Many thanks! I found why I could not get the ‘proper’ kerning - I was proofing the font with MS Word 2003 and apparently this program does not allow kerning (?) I used another program, ‘Corel Designer’, wrote some test text in rdcgaramond.ttf, and all the kerned pairs looked pretty good. With that knowledge, I kerned Q and a bunch of small letters and they looked much better in ‘Designer’ than before kerning. I’ve downloaded Open Office, tried it, and found kerning is accepted - I’ll use it for proofing after this.
Bob
My version of Word 2003 kerns by setting Format/Font/Character Spacing. Far too hidden in my mind.