Is there a reason that kerning of the base 14 fonts is disabled by default?
Furthermore, except by programmatic means, there does not seem to be a way to enable it except by using FontManager.setBase14KerningEnabled() or the deprecated method FopFactory.setBase14KerningEnabled(). This technique is used to enable it during testing in one test case: layoutengine/standard-testcases/kerning_1_on.xml, by means of special code in org.apache.fop.layoutengine.TestEnvironment. However, there appears no way for a user to enable it via non-programmitc means. To support this (which I need in testing the new generalized position adjustments for text drawing), I'm adding a base14-kerning element to be placed in the top-level fop element in the FOP configuration file, e.g., <fop> ... <base14-kerning>true</base14-kerning> ... </fop> The rationale for making this a child of the top-level fop element is that the enable/disable state is presently maintained in the singleton FontManager instance, which is configured (in FontManagerConfigurator) from other top-level children of the fop element. For consistency, it my be better to enable base14 kerning by default, then allow a user to disable it using the above mechanism. However, I have not made this latter change (yet). Comments? G.
