Problems with manual kerning

elpres — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 08:51:55 -0700

Hi all,

right now i’m working on a programm that does some manual typesetting on a pretty low level, i.e. it handles fonts as vector shapes and places them manually with no help from the OS. The feature i’m trying to get right at this moment is kerning, and while it seems to work most of the time, there are some artifacts with Cambria:

For example, he ’d’ and the ’e’ are too close, and ’tt’ or ’ty’ overlap. So i’ve taken a look into its kerning pairs table and found more than one entry for ’de’, the first one being -6 (at a font size of 40), which is the one used simply because it’s found first. Later on there are some entries with -3 and a couple more with -6, 6 entries total. Typically, i’d expect one kerning value per pair of characters. Is the fact that Cambria has more of them some kind of a glitch in the font, or, if not, which one should i choose? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Typophile - Problems with manual kerning - Comments

Problems with manual kerning