Typophile

Kerning working in notepad but not working in Wordpad or MsWord. Very confused.

aerodyll

Hi guys.

I'm a new member, I signed up to ask a question as I have been scouring the web for a week and couldn't find anything.

I'm an artist and was recently asked to make a font for my studio. I had never done anything like this before and other than photoshop could only use freeware. So I used photoshop to make the paths, exported to Inkscape to make the font file and then to fontforge to do the kerning and then generating as a TTF.

I have hit a few snags however and try as I may I cannot sort them out so I have come here to hopefully beg some help from people with much more experience in this area than I.

My font works in Fontforge metric window. The kerning works perfectly. When I export it and I look at the font preview window the glyphs are kerned. However when I open wordpad and MsWord the kerning is no longer there. What I don't get is that in notepad the kerning works as intended (though in notepad it creates black squares when I hit 'space'). I am certain this is something small that I have just overlooked but I cant seem to figure out what it is.

Can anyone shed some light on this please as I really don't want to have to spend another week banging my head against fontforge. If you need any more info I will be checking this regularly and will be able to post anything that will be useful.

Thanks for any time / help. It is much appreciated.

Michel Boyer

To fix the problem with the space you need to fix a width to the character "space" 0r 0x0020. Just select it, right click and "set width".

The kerning in Word is not activated by default. To get it you need to select "Format > Font > Advanced" and check "kerning" and specify the smallest point size for which you want kerning to be applied.

aerodyll

Hey thanks, that was what we needed! As I created this font by importing an SVG file from inkscape I didn't have a space character. I re encoded it as Windows Latin and then altered the space character as you suggested but it still causes the black box.

Thanks for your help.

Michel Boyer

Try reencoding unicode so that it looks like this http://www.typophile.com/node/105416#comment-562513.

aerodyll

Thanks for your help, its looking great now. If I could only make fontforge stop crashing I would work into this more but as it is I think this is as far as I can get it. Very much obliged for your help.

Michel Boyer

Welcome! As for FontForge on Windows, I can't help. The versions of FontForge I use are for the mac.

Captured from web.archive.org on 12 Sep 2013. view this capture