Kerning etc.
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- Engage_London
I'm atempting to make a flash thingy (lets call it that for now...) that draws type on the fly with proper spacing etc... what elements do I need to take a lot of notice to...
At the mo...
I can import alphabets and record their X and Y sizes...
I can also set spacing accordingly to the height of the type etc...
It is going toget very heavy is't it as differnt type face need different kerning... rigt from the start it is obvious that a condense font will need smaller kerning between letters...
...but also.. the kerning is obviously not uniform eg... between a K and a O for example...
can anyone else point out stuff I need to look out for?
Cheers, James
- Engage_London0
hmm looks like I've hit a live one here... If I explain what kerning is, will that help?
- unfittoprint0
I'm not a typography expert, but I think a type object array for some charathers groups could be handy:
ie. typeobj["KO"]
then
a string search function could be used to find patterns within the text
replace the _x,_y with
typeobj["KO"].leftspace = 5,
typeobj["KO"].rightspace = 5,
- Mimio0
Sounds like you need to reverse engineer Fontographer.
You need to build a matrix of spacings for each character set.
If you want to be really accurate ...modern typefaces matrices actually change subtly in proportion as they are scaled up and down.
- Engage_London0
that is a very good point mimio... was initally going to scale the spacing initally uniformally by the point size... but you're right that small text sizes should be treated on a sliding scale up to big type sizes
- mitsu0
are you going to predefine kerning pairs for each of your basic latin chars? that would be a lot of work...
- Rozza0
Yo, i also looked into doing this a while ago, and your right, its a pain in the arse and so more complex to do, than it should be (so i gave up).
But before i gave up here's what i leaned:
1) You can get the kerning pairs out of FontLab/Fontographer as a text file. These give you the adjusments you need to make to pairs of characters to get them appearing properly next to each other.
From this you can then, if need be, adjust the overall tracking.
2) You need a different set of kerning pair values for each font you have.
3) You then need to loop through each character in the string your wanting to kern, create a new textfield for each character. Then match the kerning pairs with the two current characters and adjust the x position accordingly...
At this point i got frustrated and gave up.
But I ended up creating a new version of the typeface in Fontographer with the required kerning, which worked out fine for me. That any use to you?
Anyway hope my ramblings make sence!
R
- Engage_London0
thanks for the responses all very useful :)
I'm going to make my own font... that will be solely flash based... so fontographer is out of the question at the mo... but am trying to make it as sweet as poss...
- Solid0
I can't help wondering -- after all that planning and hard work, will there be a noticable effect when you view the type in Flash (swf)?
I can see it working for larger[er] type sizes, say 24pixels and up, but not for smaller sizes ... ??
- Solid0
Are you going to draw your glyphs out in Flash?
- Engage_London0
I'll know the best size weight etc... to fit in a 200 pixel gap... etc etc.. and there are other reasons which I'll not go into at the mo