Kern type upside down

[Daniel]

One more suggestion

What about adding a check box to turn the glyphs upside down to test the kerning

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

Why?

[Alfred]

I can't see why you would want to do this, but a 'mirror vertical' transform is quick and easy to apply.

[Daniel]

Turning the typeface upside down is a good way to examine the letter shapes without the distraction of meaning

The reason kerning is so easy to miss is because your eyes tend to ignore the spacing in pursuit of reading the word or sentence. After decades of reading, adults don’t see letters anymore, we see words.

To help account for this, some designers suggest the simple trick of flipping your type upside down before kerning. It’s a brilliantly simple technique that really helps you focus on the letter shapes and how they fit together instead of getting distracted by the words.

http://designshack.net/articles/typogra ... ning-type/

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

I don't think it would help much at all. The kerning dialogue only shows two letters anyway, not whole words.

Try checking the Zoom checkbox, and hiding the grid, metrics, and baseline from the Options button (top right).

Kern Dialogue Options.png (66.49 KiB) Viewed 5620 times

[Daniel]

well, another improvement would be the ability to kern multiple letters by showing more than two in the kerning dialogbox

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

well, another improvement would be the ability to kern multiple letters by showing more than two in the kerning dialogbox

That would not be an improvement — it would make an already complex dialogue more confusing.

Someone else already requested the ability to kern both left and right pairs together, but I was not convinced by the reasons given for that either.

Maybe one of the developers will comment on Monday.

[Erwin Denissen]

I think flipping text to focus on kerning is nice enhancement, but I don't think the current kerning pair area is suitable for this. So if we want to implement it, we need to find a way to show more than 2 characters. Maybe it requires an additional kerning dialog available through the OpenType Designer, but I'm not sure.

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

There could perhaps be another checkbox on the Preview Toolbar: RTL and Invert?

[MikeW]

I think flipping text to focus on kerning is nice enhancement...

Personally, I think it is an unnecessary complication. RTL, yes, but upside down?

Its been years since I actually took a font from design to completion. I do get hired to work on others' fonts for specific tasks, kerning one of them. I have tried the upside down thing using other means (PagePlus using a temp activated version of the font)...and I don't believe it is of any real-world benefit.

While not exactly like the example shown by the article, if the whole exercise is so the brain, which can have difficulty in overlooking small errors due to familiarity of word shapes, is to basically make it unreadable, use a layout application in conjunction with FC. Or just use some text blocks with known kerning pairs in nonsensical words using the same layout application (and make sure to do so at various text sizes...). Especially at smaller sizes, all this does is give one a headache if you spend much time on kerning.

Mike

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