Well, there will always be some of that, just like with an "f" ending a line. And all in all, I think it preferable to use less negative sidebearing & kern as needed. There are other constructions that might cause problems, such as "f_ space_J", as in "of Jewish descent".

If you try this with, say, Bulmer, which has a large negative sidebearing with the j's on the left and with the f on the right, the wordspace almost disappears.

You can use an alternate J,j, with less of or no negative sidebearing as a contextual alternate when preceded by a space, but I don't know how that will work at the beginning of a line -- certainly it wouldn't work as the first character in a paragraph.

Usually, all the clever sidebearing ideas we come up with to avoid kerning with a lot of letters come back to haunt us.

FWIW

Thanks for your thoughts, Charles!

I bet there's no easy way to automatically add 80 units of kerning to every possible pair ending in j or J... :-\

Can OT sub in alternates at the beginning of lines?

Is there such a thing as a null char, so as to make pos null J +x possible? Or after a cr lf, perhaps? Although that'd be problematic for the first line.

Craig,

The solution just occurred to me. Karsten Lucke use to recommend that in a case such as this, you make the "standard" character (the encoded one) the "exception," then using calt, switch to a desired alternate.

So yes, you could make the standard J/j with about -20 units left sidebearings, then set up a class with all the alpha-numerics with your -80. Check leading punctuation while you are at it, I bet you find that things like an asterisk, colon, etc., work better with the -10 or -20 character. You will still have to kern the j with parenleft, bracketleft, etc.

It is easy to get the "j" too tight. I once set a book on Hemingway & wound up cringing every time "Kilimanjaro" appeared in the final, printed book. That has become my test word, BTW.

FWIW

“Kilimanjaro” then became your Everest :-)

ChrisL

> the tails stick out past the left margins
... They should. I mean you put them there to make the letter balance in it's default space and though they may look to you like they are sticking out, to readers, I think it's just fine.

Or, you can make not a few, but dozens of alternates, as the opposite effect occurs as well, with e.g. a non-descending J and many other characters, and then make lots of OT, and then think there is too much space from the margin to the main stem of the J compared to the line below which starts with an "L". :-p

Cheers!