New to Typophile? Accounts are free, and easy to set up.
Help on FontLab 5 Kerning Pairs Issue
Posted by Radostin Peshev in
25 Apr 2012 — 3:14pm
25 Apr 2012 — 3:14pm
Hello Typophile community,
Could anybody give me a hint on a FontLab issue: when I adjust the kerning in Kerning Pairs regarding a specific couples in a font, the change doesn't apply into the Illustrator file (or InDesign) file where this font is in use. I'm designing a Cyrillic font and took into consideration all possible Kerning Pairs in the font but these pairs doesn't look properly kerned in Illustrator. Do I make something wrong when applying "Generate Font" command or should look elsewhere.
Thank you very much in advance.
User login
Support our Sponsors
25 Apr 2012 — 4:41pm
I don't know if this is still the case, but it used to be—at least in some applications—that your font had to include one other feature besides kern to get kerning to work.
25 Apr 2012 — 11:55pm
Also, if you're making adjustments on the fly, you may need to clear your font caches for changes to take effect (how this is done will depend on your OS, but a google search should provide the necessary info).
And depending on how your FL preferences are set, you may need to manually regenerate your kern feature from the OpenType menu (available in the OpenType Pane).
André
25 Apr 2012 — 11:56pm
Could you name it what this "other feature" is or where to adjust it. Thank you very much.
26 Apr 2012 — 4:46am
This should be in "Build"
Did you change the version number of the font after editing?
Did you clean the font cache files from your computer before installing the new font?
26 Apr 2012 — 5:01am
Any other feature will work, such as adding
liga.26 Apr 2012 — 5:23am
Any other feature will work,
Not quite true. In some applications programs, you need a substitution feature -- a gsub feature -- before the gpos features are applied. liga is, of course, a substitution feature. So too is frac (fractions). But capital spacing, for example, is not.
26 Apr 2012 — 5:29am
I didn't get that, sorry, where to add "liga" ?
26 Apr 2012 — 7:15am
http://typophile.com/node/78754#comment-450658
27 Apr 2012 — 6:47am
Sorry, but nothing seems to work. Already tried few of the proposed tricks, but with no results so far. Indeed I thank everybody who tried to solve this problem.
27 Apr 2012 — 9:56am
After editing the kerning, did you update the Kern Feature via "Kerning Assistance"?
27 Apr 2012 — 10:57am
Yes, and when I click the "Ing-Yang" button "No errors found" message appears. It's very strange because when I make double check of the adjusted pairs with "Kerning Assistance" feature they all appear exactly as I set them. But when I switch to Illustrator where I have inserted long copy which is supposed to be with this typeface those pairs are still as they're auto kerned and for Cyrillic letters this is really awful. Tried dozens of tricks and nothing seems to solve the issue.
27 Apr 2012 — 1:21pm
Again, I come back to font caches. Are you on a Mac. If so I would strongly recommend downloading FOnt Nuke:
http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/21536/fontnuke
It cleans font caches and I could not work without it.
27 Apr 2012 — 2:19pm
I downloaded and ran this software and again have the same issue. Already despaired about I'll ever manage with that. Thank you very much anyway for your hints, appreciate it.
27 Apr 2012 — 3:51pm
Radostin,
I'd be happy to take a closer look at the vfb data if you care to send it to me.
28 Apr 2012 — 12:21am
Indeed, no problem, but I don't know how, could I use this forum or we should be using skype, mail or else. Thank you very much in advance.
10 Jul 2012 — 9:14am
...
28 Apr 2012 — 6:31am
Great tech support James! :-)
hhp
28 Apr 2012 — 8:21am
I was unable to help.
I added a cyrl languagesystem tag and removed the latin script declaration before the kern table.
No change.
I added a simple fraction feature which included substitutions for the percent and perthousnd
No Change
There were both complied and binary data in the font file so I created a new font file, copied all of the glyphs and kerning into it and rewrote the OT features.
No Change
29 Apr 2012 — 5:55am
Fixed.
I feel like a moron for overlooking the obvious, but languagesystem DFLT dflt was missing from the OT features.
Once that was in place the kerning worked fine.