Kerning

From DejaVuWiki

Kerning is the act of adjusting the space between two characters, for example moving A closer to V when A follows V.

Contents 1 Kerning problems in DejaVu 2 Kerning TODOs in DejaVu 3 Explorational kerning 4 Kerning classes

Kerning problems in DejaVu

Some accented characters are presently wrongly kerned in DejaVu and were such already in Vera - an example of such would be ä being kerned the same as a everywhere, which casuses a run-in of the accent in some cases, for example with T followed by ä. The case is even worse if the same kerning adjustment is used for ā.

Kerning TODOs in DejaVu

• Status of kerning in the new Serif Oblique and Serif Bold Oblique faces needs to be checked and probably adjustments made
• The condensed typefaces will probably need their own kerning
• Most new accented characters are presently unkerned
• Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic and Latin Extended characters need to be kerned in relevant fonts

Explorational kerning

It might be interesting to explore whether some more kerning pairs are needed by consulting well known kerning pair lists (references/links?) and seeing if there is any benefit in DejaVu.

• The text tool http://www.adhesiontext.com/ developped by Miguel Sousa could be used to test kerning for major languages using Latin (not extended), Cyrillic, Greek and Arabic Scripts.
• The Typophile forums have plenty of pertinent information:
  • Cyrillic Kern Pairs?
  • ChrisL testspace - similar list could be made for other character sets
• Dictionaries can be used to generated random paragraphs with reprensentative text of each languages. The aspell project provides a large list of word list, only without word frequencies.

Kerning classes

Kerning should probably be done by classes. For example: all the a with diacritics could be kerned in the same fashion, or all the narrow and short punctuation could be kerned in the same fashion after w and other accented ws.

Arev fonts have kerning classes that were extracted by a perl script from the Bitstream Vera kerning pairs. That or similar script could be used to set the base for kerning classes of Latin characters in DejaVu fonts (Serif and Sans).