Typophile

Script cap left sidebearings

Ray Larabie

What's your strategy for left sidebearings on script caps? I'm not taking about scripts where all caps would be legible. I'm taking about scripts with swishy swash script caps where words in all caps will look terrible anyway. Right sidebearings are easy to do because they can be tested against lowercase in words. But what about the left?

In the past I've used sentence endings to gauge the spacing. For example:

Yeah. Apes attacked.

I adjust the left sidebearing on the A so the word space after the period feels right. Whaddya think?

Tomi from Suomi

I'm using left quote mark a a reference.

Theunis de Jong

I adjust the left sidebearing on the A so the word space after the period feels right.

And what if a sentence starts with an 'A'?
After all, it would get the same left sidebearing.
Are you sure you wouldn't test it against a left margin of text, to see the vertical alignment against next sentences?
As for your example, I think it I would solve it with a kern ...
Although swashes are, indeed, difficult to space, especially in the middle of a phrase.

Ray Larabie

Using the left margin with lowercase above and below seems to make sense: it sounds like it would be more precise than eyeballing the cap's effect on word spaces.

Fontgrube

@Theunis de Jong
And what if a sentence starts with an ’A’?

:-))

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