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Home edition v.11.5 and kerning

Posted: Sat Feb 02, 2019 5:19 pm
by puzzled
I've just upgraded in a giant leap from FC 6.5 to the latest. I did try it out before buying, noted that AutoKern was not an option in the Home edition, no matter, because I do weird fonts and like to kern "by hand". Okay, so imported fonts were tweaked satisfactorily and kerning adjusted. Never occurred to me that such a basic function would not be available in Home Ed, but I can't get it to work on newly-created font - nearly all functions in OTF Designer greyed out, lthough try a previously-kerned font and there they are! So what am I doing wrong?

PS manual and Help of no use whatever - all they deal with involves AutoKern.

Re: Home edition v.11.5 and kerning

Posted: Sat Feb 02, 2019 7:38 pm
by Erwin Denissen
To manually add kerning follow these steps:

Open the OpenType Designer dialog and ensure you've selected the appropriate pair adjustment lookup within the kern feature as available in Scripts -> Latin -> Default.

If it doesn't already exists, then select the part you see within the left side listview, and click the Add icon in the upper left corner (the green +), to add the needed layout feature structure.
kerning.png
kerning.png (46.66 KiB) Viewed 5655 times
If your font has no features at all, you could consider adding this feature code to get you started. You can copy and paste it when you click the Code Editor button at the bottom of the dialog.

Code: Select all

script latn {
  feature Kerning1;
}

feature Kerning1 kern {
  lookup PairAdjustment1;
}

lookup PairAdjustment1 {
  pos r o <-162> <0>;
}

Re: Home edition v.11.5 and kerning

Posted: Sat Feb 02, 2019 9:08 pm
by puzzled
Very many thanks, Erwin! problem solved. :D

Re: Home edition v.11.5 and kerning

Posted: Sat Feb 02, 2019 9:25 pm
by Bhikkhu Pesala
My long post got swallowed by the forum in spite of saving a draft :cry: but it was too long for a forum post, to be honest.

I added a tutorial on OpenType Kerning in FontCreator 11.5 to my blog, where there is more room for a detailed explanation.

If anything is unclear, let me know, and I will update it.

Re: Home edition v.11.5 and kerning

Posted: Sun Feb 03, 2019 11:28 am
by puzzled
Very VERY many thanks, Bhikkhu, for taking that trouble and so quickly. Being used to 6.5, where you just clicked on Format to see Kerning, I was hunting for some similar step in this version.....Blessings and Peace to you! :D