Accessing a font's kerning table/values?
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- This topic has 11 replies, 5 voices, and was last updated 9 years, 1 month ago by Andy Mcgroarty.
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January 20, 2015 at 11:32 am #72806Andy McgroartyMember
I recently purchased Adobe’s Garamond Premier Pro typeface. In order to do some translation work i need to create some extra characters (the license allows this), they will be letters with dots underneath them. After which i will use a script to deal with the kerning of these newly created letters.
My question is, is it possible to access the kerning tables/values of this typeface? If i can just add the values to the script that would make life a whole lot easier than having to do this manually.
Thanks and best wishes.
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January 20, 2015 at 1:28 pm #72809Tom VenetiaMember
Andy,
The best and less tedious way of generating new characters for any digital font file is to use a font designing software, such as FontLab Studio.
The process is very easy: say you wish to create the character “c cedilla.” All you have to do is inside this app to copy the character “c” to the correct Unicode box and then add the little leg underneath. Since this app is vector based (such as Illustrator) it is very easy and quick to do such modifications. You do not have to worry with the kerning tables because that is intrinsically set by the app (although you can change the kerning of any pair). After this all you have to do is to generate and save the same file with a new name and load it in Windows or Mac. -
January 23, 2015 at 2:15 pm #72872Andy McgroartyMember
Thank you for your post Tom. Creating the new characters is not the problem, i have created them already with Indyfont. FontLab is way out of my budget and too much of a learning curve and what i don’t what to do is upset the ingenuity of the kerning in Adobe’s Garamond Premier Pro. I only have 5 letters to add to the set, i was just curious if there is anyway to have access to the kerning tables of those particular letters?
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January 23, 2015 at 2:46 pm #72873Dwayne HarrisMember
The last time I had to deal with kerning tables/kerning pairs was in the Quark days. But those were “pairs,” and not individual letters. I do miss that feature in InDesign.
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January 26, 2015 at 6:50 am #72906Kenneth DarbyMember
Andy,
In InDesign, and this is an InDesign forum after all, you can rely on the built-in kern-pair tables by selecting “Metrics” in the Character palette or InDesign will automatically kern your type when “Optical” is selected. Optical will kern type from two different fonts and/or two different sizes.
If it was me, I would rely on InDesign’s optical kerning for text sizes and adjust manually if needed for display sizes.-
January 26, 2015 at 8:00 am #72907Andy McgroartyMember
Thanks for taking the time out to respond Kenneth. I have been using ‘metrics’ to assess what the kern pair is normally for the letter in question and that has produced perfect results, it also gave me the idea that if I just had all those values for the letters i am using it would make life a whole lot easier as I intend to use Pete kahrels kerning script, if I just had the values i could just enter them into the script, job done.
As i am dealing with a lot of text, translations of entire books, I’m not keen on using optical kerning and I’m just trying to cut down my workload as the ‘metrics’ process is quite time consuming.
Thanks and best wishes
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January 26, 2015 at 10:19 am #72911Kenneth DarbyMember
Andy,
Many years ago (mid ’60s to mid ’70s) I worked for HMH Publishing (Playboy Magazine) in Production and as such bought a lot of typesetting from different typesetting companies, all resting with the dinosaurs. One firm’s work stood above all the rest. We used them to set headlines and display type for that reason. I inquired as to why they were so much better than the rest. The answer was that the rest of the craftsmen relied on kerning a pair of characters but their craftsmen looked at the characters before and after the offending pair and kerned or letterspaced those pairs as well to achieve the more uniform gray.
The purpose of kerning to this day is to achieve a pleasing overall color. This is the justification for the paragraph composing engine in InDesign over the former single line composer. The paragraph composer is constantly reevaluating the “color” of the paragraph to blend tight lines with loose lines.
To see whether I might be too keen on the optical kerning method in InDesign, I set some words that contained an awkward pair of characters with both optical and metrics. When I added different characters before or after the pair, the optical method adjusted the spacing throughout the new word while metrics only treated the pair for which there was a value in the kern table. By my observation the optical method was far better overall color and thus readability.
My conclusion is that you have to consider what your goal is and at what expense. Both engines run in the background and should not make any difference in time.
Best regards-
January 26, 2015 at 11:44 am #72914Andy McgroartyMember
Thank you Kenneth your post is very useful, I will definitely explore your suggestions. Thanks again.
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January 26, 2015 at 11:28 am #72913Theunis De JongMember
Andy, this is EXACTLY what I created IndyFont for! A lot of my typesetting is in the linguistics field, and there are not that many professional fonts that sport phonetic characters — or even loose diacritics, to manually position.
You can easily find out the built-in kerning of a font by setting the Kerning to Metrics (which will use the font’s own values), typing the two base characters you want to inspect, and then moving the cursor between those two characters. The value in the Kerning field then indicates the amount! This is between parentheses, such as “(-14)”, because it is an automatic value, just as the value of Leading is shown in parentheses when you use the automatic value.
So if you created a ‘?’ (a t with dot below) and want to know how much kerning is applied in the base font between ‘o’ and ‘t’, simply type them and check the value, and then you can use this same value for the underdot character. This will work for almost all combinations, as long as the underdot itself does not interfere with the character before. I don’t think there are many characters that extend at the bottom, but a combination such as ‘?j’ may need a manually determined value.
There is no easy way to read *all* kerning values out of a font. In modern OpenType fonts there is a thing called “Kerning Class”, which is an entire set of left-hand characters vs. right-hand characters. That means there may be hundreds of possible combinations … (which is why it’s stored as a class in the first place, instead of separate combinations!). If you can find an official .AFM file for your font, this usually lists kerning values for certain common pairs.
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January 26, 2015 at 11:59 am #72915Andy McgroartyMember
Thank you for your post jongware! I am having excellent success with indyfont, it’s brilliant! Your colleague Marc has been assisting me on Twitter. Although getting the dots right on the italics are quite challenging.
So, thank you for your advice. I have just gotten to the point you described in terms of using the metrics function, so your last paragraph is where I’m at and has really helped fill in a lot of gaps, much appreciated.
So if I managed to get an Afm file for Adobe garamond premier pro how would I read it?
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January 27, 2015 at 1:32 am #72933Theunis De JongMember
It is a plain text file, so you can open it with any plain text editor. Its syntax is deliberately kept as simple as possible: first, some general font information, followed by the exact metrics of each separate character, and then the list of kern pairs follow. All sections are clearly marked.
The hardest part is finding an .AFM file for your font in the first place. They are for the precursor of modern, self containing OpenType fonts: separate ‘outline’ files in .PFB format. I am only guessing .AFM files should still be available for modern fonts, because there is still a lot of legacy software that can’t use OTF fonts right away.
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January 27, 2015 at 4:05 am #72934Andy McgroartyMember
Thank you Theunis this is very useful. I will get in touch with Adobe and see if they can help me obtain this file.
Thanks and best wishes
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