Typophile

Kerning & Metrics-assistance in FOG

Göran Söderström

I’m looking for .meq and .keq-files to make classes of kern pairs in Fontographers Kerning Assistance.

There are some that comes with FOG, but they don’t include all the accented letters. I could set this up myself, but since I am rather novice in FOG maybe I will forget about some classes.

I’m about to all by myself produce my first commercial font that is going to be distributed, so I want to make sure I make everything correct and don’t forget about something.

So I was thinking there perhaps could be some resources out there? Template-files and such for this kind of matters?

Thanks, and kind regards from Sweden!

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Alessandro Segalini

http://developer.apple.com/textfonts/TTQualSpec/index.html

http://www.typographer.org/2005_11_01_digests.html

Göran Söderström

Alessandro, I dont know why you are giving these links, it seems they have nothing to do with metrics in Fontographer... or am I missing something?

Alessandro Segalini

I just thought you might like to check them if you have time. I don’t have a word about metrics in Fontographer, sorry. I know there are test text files for checking the results, tho.

Göran Söderström

Ah, OK — thanks Allessandro!

Mark Simonson

The problem with using already built sets of classes is that one set will not work with all fonts. It’s not that hard to build a set from scratch and you are guaranteed that it will be optimized for the font you are working on.

I don’t use Fontographer anymore, but the principle is the same for any font editor. I start out by analyzing all my glyphs, sorting them into groups with similar right or left sides. This becomes the basis for my kerning classes. Keep in mind that you don’t necessarily want to group accented glyphs with their unaccented counterparts. Also keep in mind that some character combinations may never come up in normal use.

Yes, it can be a bit tedious, but there isn’t really any short cut that works better than thorough planning and methodical follow-through. With some people, it helps to have music on. I like to listen to audio books or talk radio.

Göran Söderström

Wise words. Thank you.

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