[XeTeX] IM Fell Type and XeTeX

[Alexey Kryukov]

On Sat, 14 Feb 2009 13:31:24 -0800

> 3) The procedure in Fontforge you described introduce "some errors
> detected". At 99% it means kerning or other things messed up. I
> made "nearly free" the Fell Types, among other things, to show the
> quality of my autospacing and autokrning tool.

Hi Ekin,

I tried the procedure you have described, and didn't notice
any errors, except those reported by FontForge when loading the
font (indeed, these messages can safely be ignored in most cases).
You also can write Igino Marini that FontForge is usually very accurate
in handling spacing and kerning, so it is nearly impossible to get
them messed up just because of scaling the font to a different UPM.

The only reason for which I would avoid applying such a procedure
to my own fonts is that it introduces small irregularities
(plus-minus 1 em) to values (spline lengths, stem widths) which
are supposed to be exactly the same. But this effect would
matter only for carefully designed outlines, which is not
the case here: in fact the splines in IM Fell Type fonts are
so ugly (I think they are produced simply by autotracing bitmap
images, without even a minimal postprocessing), that I would
never used such fonts myself and never recommended using them
to anybody else. You can't distort such contours just by scaling
them because their point placement is already very irregular.

> I asked not to modify the font just
> to prevent that someone thinking to be smart mess up my work because
> I usually want to be responsible of my errors only. Expecially in
> presence of "some errors detected". Thank you for having shown that I
> failed on this.

This makes no sense. As far as you are not going to distribute the
files you have modified, the original author has absolutely no
reasons to fear somebody will blame him for your errors.

-- 
Regards,
Alexey Kryukov <anagnost at yandex dot ru>

Moscow State University
Historical Faculty