What is the advantage of exporting the "Legacy Kern Table"

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1

I’ve been exporting all my fonts with "Legacy ‘kern’ Table enabled but it does make my font larger in size. I’m wondering what exactly is this feature and what does it do…is it necessary?

Thanks,

Jonne

2

There are applications that still do not use gpos but do use the kern table.

3

So would you recommend exporting the font with Legacy enabled just in case? In your professional opinion?

4

No, better forget about that unless you already have a large user base from years ago who like to keep the word-breaks equal to how they were 10 years ago, or with software made 10 years ago.

5

Thanks Erwin!

Not exporting to Legacy cuts my font size in half. I won’t export to that anymore.

Hope your new creation is selling like hot cakes!

Blessings,

Jonne

6

Yes. All Serif Applications, except for the latest PagePlus X9, so I do included the legacy kerning tables.

Pali Regular:

With Legacy Table: 1.08 MB (1,133,900 bytes) • 7z = 282 KB (288,968 bytes)
Without Table: 801 KB (820,328 bytes) • 7z = 259 KB (265,714 bytes)

Disk space is a non-issue. Download bandwidth is not a big issue. Kerning not working in some applications is a big issue.

7

It used to be that MS Word needed a legacy kern table and they were late to support GPOS but the more recent versions from 2010 onwards don’t need it anymore.