Kent Karlsson wrote:
> Joop Jagers:
>
> > The problem of overlapping glyphs should IMO not be solved by creating
> > ligatures, but by kerning the offending pairs of glyphs.
>
> You mean negative kerning (tweaking them apart)? That is almost certain
> to create horrible glyph spacing for many fonts.
>
> Note that by "ligature" we don't always mean a typographic ligature
> (nicely(?) joined "ink"), but just technically a ligature (a single
> glyph, but the "inks" for what an onlooker would see as the letters
> may be separate), or other contextual shaping that has the same effect.
> (Without creating terrible spacing effects...)
>
> /kent k
I *do* mean kerning, but in Font Creator this is called *positive* kerning,
which increases the space between two glyphs which would overlap when not
kerned. Usually kerning is taken to mean *decreasing* the space between two
glyphs like VA, which seem to be too far apart. Please note: I'm talking
about adding kerning information in a font file, not about kerning within
an application like Word.
Creating separate glyphs for pairs of characters is IMO a bad solution: none
of these glyphs is present in Unicode, so they have to be implemented in the
PUA, where no compatibility can be guaranteed. Adding kerning information to
a font is a very simple and straightforward procedure. The results of
kerning can be beautiful or terrible, depending on the good taste of the
font designer, but this is also true when separate ligature glyphs are
created.
--
Joop Jagers (Eindhoven, NL)
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