URL: <https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?67544>
Summary: kern ugly glyph pairs
Group: GNU roff
Submitter: barx
Submitted: Tue 23 Sep 2025 01:54:49 AM CDT
Category: None
Severity: 3 - Normal
Item Group: None
Status: None
Privacy: Public
Assigned to: None
Open/Closed: Open
Discussion Lock: Any
Planned Release: None
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Follow-up Comments:
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Date: Tue 23 Sep 2025 01:54:49 AM CDT By: Dave <barx>
Bug #66033 will ultimately determine whether certain adjacent glyphs look
inelegant because of a flaw in the original font metrics. That ticket,
seeking to regenerate groff's font metrics from original sources, may fix the
problematic glyph pairs automatically. But that ticket may get postponed past
1.24: it's gated on unresolved questions.
Conversely, it's easy and low-risk to add kernpair data to groff's font
metrics to improve typography. Thus this should be done before 1.24 if it
appears that #66033 won't make the cut.
[http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/commit/?id=280724f9d Commit
280724f9d] notes the clash between "a roman f and a roman closing double
quotation mark" in the Times family. Every Times font kerns the f and a
closing single quote, but only one handles the double.
$ egrep "^f ('|cq)" font/devps/T*
font/devps/TB:f ' 55
font/devps/TB:f cq 55
font/devps/TBI:f ' 55
font/devps/TBI:f cq 55
font/devps/TI:f ' 92
font/devps/TI:f cq 92
font/devps/TR:f ' 55
font/devps/TR:f cq 55
$ egrep '^f ("|rq)' font/devps/T*
font/devps/TB:f rq 50
To my eyes, the f” pairing looks OK in TI (which has no kernpair for it) but
less so in TB (which does have one). I'd be tempted to increase the kerning
in TB, add some in TBI and TR, and leave TI alone.
The f” pairing looks OK in all of groff's other shipped fonts besides the BM
family. This family lacks kernpair data for f followed by any punctuation:
$ grep '^f ' font/devps/B*
font/devps/BMB:f f 21
font/devps/BMBI:f f 10
font/devps/BMI:f f -19
font/devps/BMR:f f 29
And indeed, f followed by a closing quote, either single or double, looks
subpar in this family.
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