Re: [ft-devel] Peter Wiegel's auto spacing idea

[Vernon Adams]

This is very interesting, reminds me of David Kindersley's work on 'optical spacing'. I think that spacing for web and screen fonts could be dealt with like this fairly straightforward because of the role that the pixel grid plays in determining final rendered spacing. Would be interesting to test it.

Also thinking this could be built into an app like robofont very easily - would just need to add a blur effect etc to the glyphs in spacing mode. could that be done in fontforge too? Using freetype or pango?
-vern

Sent from Samsung tablet

Dave Crossland <address@hidden> wrote:


Hi

Peter asked me to forward his auto spacing idea to the ttfautohint and
fontforge devel lists :-)

Cheers
Dave

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Peter Wiegel <address@hidden>
Date: 12 June 2012 15:06
Subject: ttfautokern
To: address@hidden


Dear Sir,

I am also working with fonts, and I found, that kerning it's a very
time-consuming job, especially with the font that have a lot of
glyphs. I often have seen fonts, that has a good kerning for all that
ANSI-leters, but the poor or even nonexisting kerning for all the
Unicode letters, and so I have the idea for another tool like  you're
fantastic ttfautohint.

I think, that could work like this: the software has to build and you
conture around any glyphe, in a way that the distance to the outline
of the glyphe is depending on its form, so that the  new outline is
closer to sharp edges then to straight lines. this could be done in
the way I have described in the attached graphic.

First I have made a pixel copy of my letters. Then I have blurred this
little picture and after that I had reduced all the gray pixels to
black. this new picture can be traced, so I get a new outline around
my glyphes. The next step is to move all the glyphs to gether, until
the new outline we get in touch, so it must be possible to calculate a
good value for this kerning pair. this could be done automatically
with all glyphs in the font, or even with all possible combinations in
any language.

I hope that you understand me. Please let me know about your thinking
on this idea.

With kind regards
Peter Wiegel

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