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Why is the kerning value in brackets in InDesign?
Posted by DotlessHyphen in
24 Nov 2010 — 6:42am
24 Nov 2010 — 6:42am
I generated a font with just one kerning pair of -60.
The font appeears in InDesign CS5 ME with no kerning visible but the kern values in the menu appear in brackets (-60).
Fontlab 5.04 build 2741
In the prefernces, Generating Open Type... Kerning:
Expand class kerning while building [kern] table.
InDesign CS5 ME
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24 Nov 2010 — 7:01am
That's normal. That's how it looks when it's set to metrics. When you set custom values, they appear without the parenthesis.
24 Nov 2010 — 7:07am
But this is odd, no kerning visible between the pair of glyphs in InDesign...
24 Nov 2010 — 7:19am
BTW, in Illustrator the same kern pair looks just fine.
24 Nov 2010 — 7:20am
Is this a r-t-l font?
24 Nov 2010 — 7:34am
yep
24 Nov 2010 — 9:20am
r-t-l kerning is a little tricky. You can't just adjust the kern values like you would in l-t-r languages. You need to adjust both the position and kerning values (and IIRC it does not really display correctly in VOLT). I don't remember the details and I don't have VOLT with me to check and remind myself how it was done.
24 Nov 2010 — 9:24am
Actually, it seems like an ID CS5 bug. It works perfect in CS4, CS3. ID gets it all wrong when it needs to display RTL kerned glyphs, while Illustrator does it just fine.
A bug report is cooking. Thanks anyway.
24 Nov 2010 — 9:45am
How are you doing the kerning? I have r-t-l fonts which are properly kerned in CS5...
24 Nov 2010 — 10:30am
With kern table
24 Nov 2010 — 11:35am
Simple kern tables? In Fontlab?
I have never been able to make basic kern tables work for r-t-l fonts in any version of InDesign. The only way I was successful was with VOLT. (I suppose it can be done now with AFDKO, but I haven't done any OT work in a while.)
You need more advanced GPOS tables than what Fontlab produces (but like I mentioned before I don't remember the details). The GPOS table used four values rather than a single kern value...