[XeTeX] Kerning

[John Was]

Thanks for that - the musings about ligatures were really a bit of an afterthought, and the feature would really only be of use while experimenting with glyphs.  Once they looked right the obvious next step would be to include them directly in a font.

Best


John Was


----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Jonathan Kew 
  To: Unicode-based TeX for Mac OS X and other platforms 
  Sent: Wednesday, June 20, 2007 12:27 AM
  Subject: JunkEmail: Re: [XeTeX] Kerning


  On 19 Jun 2007, at 6:23 am, John Was wrote:


    Hello


  Hello John,


    I wonder if there exists, or there are plans for, a facility to modify the kerns of a Unicode and/or outline font within XeTeX without specifically editing the font


  It's a request that has come up a few times, in varying forms. There's no current work in this area (unless someone is working on a patch that I don't know about!), but it's something I would like to get to eventually. The actual design of such a feature is still open to suggestions...


    something like:

    \myfont = "Minion Pro"[:myfont.krn] at 11pt

    The file myfont.krn would be a list of user-defined kerns to be applied to \myfont only within the document


  Yes, this sort of thing would be possible, in principle - though note that kerns will have to be expressed in terms of glyphs, not characters. (Consider a font with many swash variants of "T" - you don't necessarily want the same kerns between each of these and adjacent glyphs.)


    If this works in principle, it could be extended to include automatic invocation of ligatures,



  This is somewhat less likely to happen, because of the added complexity of making it interact properly with the existing layout features in the font (e.g, GPOS kern features). Additional kern pairs could be applied after the standard layout is complete, as a final step. Glyph changes here, on the other hand, ought to interact with the rest of the OpenType layout process - in ways that would require some careful consideration.


    perhaps even from a different font



  And this is *much* less likely to be implemented. At this point, it's starting to sound like building a whole new version of the "virtual font" infrastructure. I don't think that's a good way forward in the modern world. Better to focus on creating (or stimulating the creation of) fonts that do actually contain the character & glyph repertoire and behavior you need.


  JK




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