Font Forum

Hi all. I'm getting the hang of FCP 9 with Open Type features and doing well for the most part. I do, however, have a question about autokerning for some characters. When I autokern, all of the regularly mapped characters are taken into account, grouped into classes, and kerned. However, I can't figure out why my alternates, ligatures, Cyrillic characters, and most punctuation is ignored. As a workaround I tried manually adding the alternates to existing classes but there are so many I'm sure there's an easy way to do this. Thanks!

Autokern only generates pairs for Latin Basic characters.

My fonts contain a huge number of alternate glyphs for Small Capitals, Petite Capitals, Titling Capitals, Superscripts, and Greek. Rather than relying on FontCreator to autogenerate classes for me, I manually created all of the groups that I need.

Now that I have done that for one font, I just import the data file to the OpenType Designer for other fonts, and run Autokern from there to regenerate the adjustment pairs for the existing classes.

Thanks for the reply Bhikkhu. I do have a followup question. I have a ligature "ee" . When I create a separate class for this "not used!" is displayed next to it. If I did that for all the alternates (created their own separate class) and hit autokern would that work?

Dennis wrote:Thanks for the reply Bhikkhu. I do have a followup question. I have a ligature "ee" . When I create a separate class for this "not used!" is displayed next to it. If I did that for all the alternates (created their own separate class) and hit autokern would that work?

No. For Autokern to calculate kerning pairs you have to Add the kerning pairs. Just creating a class for ee ligature won't do anything. You would need to add an Adjustment Pair for, e.g. Tee ligature. You could also add the ee ligature to the class for lowercase e if you have one, then Tee will use the same pair as Te.

In my font, I have a class for FL ligature, and a pair for FL ligature hyphen.
The FL Ligature class includes LL ligature.
The hyphen class includes en-dash and em-dash.

Together, I get six pairs: Fl- FL– Fl— LL- LL– and LL— all with the same adjustment value of -293 funits.