Typophile

Kerning pairs missing, except for key glyphs

LexLuengas

On Pages, some kerning pairs of my font are missing. Surprising for me is that this happens for just some of the glyphs within a kerning class created in FontLab. The inconsistencies are consistent through my whole type family:

  • /W/ and /V/ both belong to the same kerning class (right and left), but the behavior is not as expected.
  • /Va/ works but the kerning pair /Wa/ is missing.
  • For both /Vo/ and /Wo/ the kerning is not recognized.

Only the characters belonging to the kerning classes shown have this problem in Pages.

In InDesign (using the font's kerning, not optically calculated), Font Book and TextEdit everything works fine, but in Photoshop the behavior is even worse, with more missing kerning pairs, which were present in Pages, like /Va/ or /TA/.

Any hints?

LexLuengas

I removed the V class, which contained /V/ and /W/, and kerned them independently to see what was really going on. In fact, I noticed that ALL kerning pairs are missing, except those of the key glyphs from each kerning class. Now I have a problem. I thought I could "brute-force" solve this by kerning each problematic pair individually, but now this isn't an option anymore.

Any ideas? Does this has to do with the OpenType export preferences? What am I missing?

I'm going insane: trying it all, comparing with other fonts... nothing seems to enlighten anything.

LexLuengas

http://typophile.com/node/61738

Frederic Rich

Hi Alexis, could you tell me which part of the link you provided actually did help you ? I have the same problem as you seem to have on a new font I'm working on right now, and I'm not sure I get the solution.

LexLuengas

Hi Frederic,
Karsten Luecke's comment ("k.l.", 8.Sep.2009, 3.44am) about turning off the "Export old-style non-OpenType kern table" option in FontLab > Preferences > Generating OpenType & TrueType > Kerning. It did the trick for me ;-)

Frederic Rich

Thank you Alexis for getting back to me so fast. As strange as it seems, this doesn't work for me. To be more accurate, kerning IS rendered as it should be in Photoshop or other software, but this time I'm having an issue with PHP and creating images with GD library, but I guess it could be something different. Thank you again for your answer ;)

Bert Vanderveen

The behavior of PhotoShop concerning OT-features differs from version to version. It would certainly help if you’d provide the version number(s).

Chris Lozos

Sometimes, you have to go through and delete the over rides of class kerns. If you keep the selection "class kerning with exceptions" on, it is quite easy to just tab to the next pair and add a zero to it by accident. Overrides are marked in red, so you can run down the kern table and see if that is your problem.

When you combine 2 classes, you have to remember to delete the kerning in the old key glyph that is now just a class member.

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