Auto-kerning is for lazy designers.

ikern.com is worth looking at. Some people will call it lazy, but Jos Buivenga appears to be getting great results with it, and enough people on Typophile use his fonts that I think we would be hearing about it if the results were bad.

ikern.com is worth looking at.

That does look interesting.

hmmm i agree with terminaldesign, auto kern is for lazy designers but maybe not in this case. He’s (Dr Jack?) mentioned, he’s making a ’blockish’, ’rectangular’ font. I’m guessing its going to be monospaced. So autokern may not be such a bad option.

Making a complerte kerning table would be just a waste of time.

—
arjun

What I interpreted in the question is not so much “auto kerning” (though that’s the term Jack used) as “kerning assistance” or class kerning.

A monospaced font would not need kerning. That would defeat the purpose.

And I would think a ’blockish’ ’rectangular’ all-caps design would need minimal or even *no* kerning.

So I’m not sure what the point of the question is exactly.

Why do we have to interpret questions?

If the font is blockish, then it probably needs no kerning (or only a touch). But it will have to be properly spaced. I don’t think you want to auto-spaced the font. But the whole Uppercase alphabet could be spaced in a very short time.

Sorry if I have confused people, and hopefully I am writing in a manner that is clear and correct to wiser heads.

I fully understand Terminaldesign’s opinion on kerning and laziness.
I am a Graphic Designer of many years and would hate a fully automated process that for instance, automated a t-shirt design, or a logo, or business card art, or web graphics, etc.

But more my question was related to the things you can control.
Here’s a wider example, and hopefully this helps.
Say the font was regimented by being blockish and you wanted the same kerned relationship between all the glyphs.
Now we have 200 glyphs and within those 200 glyphs we have 59 different widths.
(The 200 glyphs fit into 59 widths)
And you know the same spacing you want across all 59 width occurrences, because however stupidly, you think it looks good!.

So, is it possible to ask FontLab to look at all possible occurrences of all glyphs, irrespective of width, and equally kern them? Or doesn’t FontLab need to know the width to automatically kern fonts?

Apologies, if I’m asking a stupid question. I’m learning and I just wondered if this was feasible. I already know that professional, individual (and time consuming) kerning of glyphs is the correct and professional thing to always do. Just wanted to know that if you had a regimented situation, was this possible.

Thanks Again for any insights.