On Thu, 4 Feb 2010 07:45:29 +0300 Alexandre Prokoudine <alexandre.prokoudine at gmail.com> dijo:
>On 2/4/10, John Jason Jordan wrote: > >>>> What if we could, well, revamp the entire concept of character >>>> spacing in such a way that kerning would no longer be needed? >> >>>http://typophile.com/node/66574 >>>http://code.google.com/p/sortsmill/ >> >> How do these concepts compare to InDesign's optical character >> spacing? > >Weren't ID's optical thingies loosely modeled after URW's Kp >application and thus using a completely different approach? I've never heard of URWs Kp application. As for InDesign's optical character spacing, my very dim understanding is that it is based on the area between characters, calculated from the outer path of the glyphs on the left and the right, and the baseline and x-height on the top and the bottom. Except for caps and letters with ascenders the top margin must be different. In other words, InDesign would calculate the area using the above edges. Then it would adjust the inter-character spacing to the nearest 1/100 of an em space so that all glyphs would have close to the same area between them. The user can choose between optical character spacing and metric character spacing, where the latter simply uses the metrics built into the font. Either can be applied to a paragraph or character style. Having used it I can say that the results of optical character spacing are really wonderful. I never had to do any manual tweaking at all. It was especially useful for older and cheaper fonts where the font metrics were not well designed. And the speed of screen display was never bogged down when I used it, even though you'd expect all that calculating to make a tremendous load on the CPU. I should google to see if I am right and to get additional detail, but it's late and I'm tired.
