Typophile

Kern question.

trama

Hello everybody,

I´m a beginner in type design, and I want to learn about kerning and fontlab kern techniques.

There is a quick technique in fontlab?

Tks for your time.
Martin

No.

The quick technique in FontLab is called class kerning. That means quickly explained that you kern groups of similar shapes together, instead of kerning every letter against every other letter.

For instance on the right side of O, the D have a similar shape, and if spaced properly you can kern every D at the same time you kern the O. In the long run you save a lot of time.

It's a little bit tricky at first (at least for me) to understand it completely, but I think trial and error together with some reading here on other threads and in the FontLab manual is the only way to master this.

Fontlab can auto-generate the classes (read the manual), but nothing compared to manually adding and fine-tuning those classes yourself.

Tks for your comments!

Oh, do not auto-generate the classes. It makes a mess only, in my opinion.

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