Typophile

Hints, Sidebearings, and a theory

Göran Söderström

Hi all,

I’m sitting here learning Fontographer and have a few questions.

1. As a font-designer, must I learn the hinting process or could I (as the manual suggests) let it be on “auto” and just leave it?

2. When it comes to placing the letter between the sidebearings, I have a theory here which I would be very happy to get some inputs of. In most of the fonts I have used, the letters are placed with equal sidebearings (more or less anyway). But, what really happens when the user later on set the text in one textblock, in InDesign or Quark?

What I mean, is:
If you set a headline and bodycopy with different sizes adjusted to the left in the same text-block – the headline is automatically placed a little bit to the right, isnt it? This is due to the left “space” of the character. The bigger the headline, the bigger the distance becomes. To solve this, the user have to make the headline in one separate textblock and move it a little bit to the left in order to get a feel that the headling and bodycopy is on the same vertical “guideline”

To my theory:
Wouldnt it be a more user-friendly approach to place all letters as close to the left sidebearing as possible, and build the font according to this approach instead? So that every character starts on “zero”. Then the left margins would be more straight for the user of the font.

Looking forward to hear your thoughts on this matter.

Regards from Sweden

Göran

www.neptuna.se

‹ true type to open type char set order ›
Chris Lozos

This would only work if all glyphs were symetrical and equivalent on all their left sides. The trouble is that you must balance interletterspacing to different optical values of space. The left of a V is not optically balanced to the left of an H, for example.

ChrisL

Göran Söderström

I think that I maybe wasnt so clear in my explanation (probably because my bad english). I give it another try =)

The V and H always has the same unoptical balance, no matter where it’s placed, isnt it?

Keep the same spacing but move the letters all to the left. Like you take every letter and move them to the left. In my opinion, the same optical problems will always occure if they are to the left, middle or to the right.

As an example: The “V” would even even break the left sidebearing, then it will look like this in InDesign.

Maybe I’m completely wrong here, but there must have been theories like this before... for me it seems like the font would become more user-friendly.

Mark Simonson

The problem with your idea is that, by making the left sidebearings equal (in effect) regardless of size, you will now have twice as much difference on the right sidebearing when comparing different sizes. Sure, it will work okay for flush left

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