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I'm a complete newbie at opentype features. Trying to learn as much as I can, but there doesn't seem to be that much information on the web for beginners.
I'm looking for an explanation of the logic and basic syntax of class-based kerning. Something in the style of this wonderful article about substitution features, but for kerning. I would also love any resources on specifically doing this with fontforge, but I can figure out this easier if I understand what's going on in the background (tables? subtables? what?)
Any pointers will be very much appreciated
4 Mar 2012 — 12:36am
Kerning
4 Mar 2012 — 5:20am
Make a new font.
Go to Element/Font info
Choose Lookups/GPOS
and Add Lookup
Choose Pair position (kerning)
In window Kerning format choose Use a matrix of kerning classes
In fields First character I put D and O, and in Second character C G O Q. FontForge set the kerning to -110, I changed it to 10.
In Kerning Metrics window I wrote OQ
You can change the kern value moving the green line between chosen letters
In window Kerning by classes you can see the result
In window Font information/Lookups/GPOS you can right-click the lookup and choose Save Feature File (or only choosen lookup)
Saved
The important part of this file looks like this:
lookup kernHorizontalKerninginLatinloo { lookupflag 0; @kc0_first_1 = [\D \O ]; @kc0_second_1 = [\C \G \O \Q ]; pos @kc0_first_1 @kc0_second_1 22; } kernHorizontalKerninginLatinloo; feature kern { script DFLT; language dflt ; lookup kernHorizontalKerninginLatinloo; script latn; language dflt ; lookup kernHorizontalKerninginLatinloo; } kern;As you can see there is one class -left=first- with /D/O and one class -right=second- with /C/G/O/Q and the kern value between them is set to 22.
4 Mar 2012 — 5:30am
Wow, Janek, is that FontForge!? (Scratching head -- perhaps I should check it again. The interface looks more than a bit improved over the butt-ugly version I tried a couple of years ago.)
4 Mar 2012 — 6:08am
It is :) Most powerful tho little buggy
don't know how it looks under mac, here for win: http://typophile.com/node/84219
4 Mar 2012 — 6:10am
Could be the FontForge for Windows they were talking about a while back with how XP-like the chrome is.
5 Mar 2012 — 1:04pm
thank you thank you thank you thank you!
11 Mar 2012 — 12:25pm
Some maybe basic questions: Do I create a new subtable for each class combination? or can I just add to the same one?
12 Mar 2012 — 3:10am
One lookup for all classes you want to kern. You can create the second lookup for Greek script and the third for Cyryllic script. See Brill font by John Hudson as the recent and elaborated example.
12 Mar 2012 — 6:55am
Here is a video memo I made for myself, maybe it can be useful!