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• • June 5, 2014 at 7:33 am #68821
    Andy Mcgroarty

    Member

    Hi there

    I have been reading a lot that one of the reasons why we shouldn’t bother using free fonts because they have very poor kerning. So i wanted to ask a question as to how we can assess the kerning of a font?

    I wonder whether the following method is reliable?

    I have a line of text, highlight it, change the kerning to metric and then move my cursor through the text and watch the kerning numbers. If after almost each letter the value changes then this has good kerning, if there are hardly any value changes then this font has minimal kerning.

    I have tried this and found that with Pro fonts like my Adobe fonts the value changes almost every letter, but free fonts and also system fonts the value hardly ever changes.

  • June 5, 2014 at 8:44 am #68826
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    Yes, that will tell you if the font designer has included kerning pairs in the font design.
    Of course, for some fonts and uses, I set the kerning to Optical. You can apply optical kerning to a font with no kerning pairs and sometimes get pretty decent kerning. :)

  • June 5, 2014 at 12:12 pm #68828
    Andy Mcgroarty

    Member

    Cool! Thanks David! I’m glad to know that i am starting to get the hang of this!

    Yes, i have tried optical kerning with the fonts that have no kerning pairs and it seems to work really well. I am surprised at how few kerning pairs are to be font in many fonts though, even bought fonts from major font companies. Oh well, hey ho!

    Thanks again for your help.

    Best wishes

  • June 6, 2014 at 8:01 am #68842
    Andy Mcgroarty

    Member

    So, would it be fair to say that when you have a professional font like Adobe Garamond Premier Pro for example, when they have clearly went to a lot of trouble to make kerning pairs, we shouldn’t really mess about with it too much? In terms of kerning and word and letter spacing? Should we just use as is with the metric kerning switched on and not do much else?

  • June 6, 2014 at 8:39 am #68844
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    That’s an aesthetic opinion. :-)

    I usually use Optical for headline type, and leave it set to metrics for body type.

  • June 11, 2014 at 1:00 pm #68950
    Andy Mcgroarty

    Member

    Ok, thank you David. That is useful to know.

    Best wishes

  • June 18, 2014 at 12:59 am #69040
    Andy Mcgroarty

    Member

    I have been pondering on this subject in my attempt to understand how to choose the right font and I wondered if there is any way to determine how many kerning pairs there may be in a particular font? Or any similar useful information from the font file or elsewhere?

    Then you could easily see whether you should waste your time with a particular font or not.

    Thanks and best wishes

    • June 18, 2014 at 2:49 pm #69062
      Dwayne Harris

      Member

      I don’t think there’s a standard so far as determining kerning pairs.

      I admit that while I dislike Quark at this stage of my career, I used to use it before InDesign. Quark had a nice feature where you could edit the kerning pairs, so you could increase or decrease the kerning values.

      Like David, I usually use Metric for body text, and optical for display type. And have had luck fixing kerning pairs using optical kerning on them via search and replace.

      For some fonts, the issue is not kerning pairs. It’s kerning “triples.” There is one font (I can’t remember which), but I loathe it. If you have a period followed by a space and a capital T or a captial A, there is almost zero space between the period and the cap letter. It looks like it was set up tight. But if it’s a cap W or a cap B or something, it looks fine.

      I think I mentioned in another thread about the problems with some of those triple combinations with Adobe Garamond Pro, Minion Pro, and Caslon Pro. I had to write macros to fix those.

  • June 19, 2014 at 12:41 am #69076
    Andy Mcgroarty

    Member

    Thanks again Dwayne, that is all really useful. It’s a shane that there isn’t more info on what goes into a font. I have several bought professional font’s and i’m quite surprised at how poor they look and kern. Oh, well the quest continues!

    Best wishes

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