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FOG and Kerning Woes
Posted by Daniel Denk in
20 Jun 2007 — 12:44pm
20 Jun 2007 — 12:44pm
Before I pull my hair out over this, I thought I'd just pop off a question here.:
Kerning in FOG
The fonts I'm generating are all generating with the kerning pairs I've created - but - they don't have any effect in the font. Running TTFDUMP or TXX, nothing jumps out at me as to why this is happening.
Perhaps I'm missing something?
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20 Jun 2007 — 1:38pm
What you're missing is FontLab.
20 Jun 2007 — 1:55pm
Ha. What I may be missing is the upgrade to the Windows FOG, to handle the memory architecture issue, which has been said was planned since FontLab took over FOG -- but only happened for Mac... ;)
But actually, the Kerning issue really doesn't make sense to me at the moment, unless there's something I'm doing wrong.
These are pixel-faces, by the way - so perhaps Hrant would have some clue?
20 Jun 2007 — 3:29pm
Well, what I've done for now -- is the age-hold and trusted method of sidebearing spacing in multiples of 125 left / 126 right to counter the problem. And instead, the problematic characters (basically just the lowercase 'j') set to 0 left.
I wish I could have kerned this though with a couple of the caps. But it'll work for now. The small 'j' was really the only character that was breaking up the text in a major way. By subtracting it one pixel it reads a-okay.
One of the things that baffled me, was I initially attempted to just bring the left side-bearing into the small 'j'. But what this caused on Win XP was it butted the character up to the character to the right. This technique worked fine in Win 98, but not in XP. Interesting. Not sure if that's a TrueType renderer bug in XP, or what.
20 Jun 2007 — 3:54pm
Oh, and that at least allows a quick a dirty way to have both a tight and loose version, by only playing with the right side-bearing for the extra 1-pixel space.
Tight: Left SB 125 / Right SB 1
Loose: Left SB 125 / Right SB 126
(And any characters needing a pseudo-kern (like a 'j'), set the LSB to 0.)
22 Jun 2007 — 4:05pm
Well, now I feel kind of silly. I think I located the conflict, though I have to run through the process again with the original metrics and kern pairs.
There was a flipped tag order in the header that I think may have caused the problem. This was my bad though, probably not FOG's issue. Font Validator was useful in confirming the order issue for me in this case.
(The fonts were mapped out by hand in XML/TTX and originally compiled with TTX.exe. I may have just gotten the order wrong in my template for the two tags in question.)
Also: Noted, is I don't prefer the loose spacing of pixel-fonts, but the note in the above comment may be useful for anyone who really wants to make a loosely spaced pixel-font. Those are the values you should probably go by. I just don't see the need for it, when you can easily space (typeset) within Flash -- but depending on the design of the font, of course.
25 Jun 2007 — 4:14am
Woops, yep. That was the problem. I'm now going back and running through the kerning metrics to finalize my fonts. Ouch.