On Sep 15, 2011, at 2:09 PM, steve harley wrote: > on 2011-09-15 10:41 Mark Roberts wrote >> Darren Addy<pixelsmi...@gmail.com> wrote: >> >>> There are a ton of >>> free font sites out there and good free fonts can be found, but there >>> is a lot of crap out there, as well. In breaking down a font, the >>> letter forms themselves might be fine, but the leading may be >>> inconsistent as you type them on the computer. >> >> I think you're a bit astray here: Leading is the height (vertical >> distance) between lines of text and not part of the font >> characteristic at all. You may be referring to the Set Width of the >> characters, which is a characteristic of the font. > > i think he's referring more to the kerning tables, which, as you mention, > define the spacing of individual pairs of characters (e.g. "To" should be > spaced differently from "Th"); these kerning pairs make a big difference in > the "color" of large blocks of type (how the text looks as a mass); good > fonts have hundreds or thousands of hand-tuned kerning pairs; knock-off and > hobby fonts often have little regard for this kind of quality; compensating > for this by hand is hopeless with large quantities of text, but there are > tools, such as the Optical Character Spacing option in InDesign, which can > force shabby fonts to lay out with fairly good color, assuming other aspects > of the font are adequate > > I think you meant that OCS can force fonts to lay out with fairly good letter spacing -- or kerning. And of course you can hand kern in InDesign or Quark. It was relatively simple with Quark. Unfortunately, I've had only minimal experience with InDesign -- something I need to correct -- but I suspect kerning is fairly simple in that program as well.
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