[XeTeX] Adobe Kepler Std: Extraneous space always inserted between left paren and f

[John Was]

Hello

I strongly suspect it's in the kerning table of the font since Adobe's 
Minion Pro exhibits this to a small extent also (the visual effect isn't as 
much as a full space, but the parentheses are definitely too far from the 
adjacent character).  Perhaps something of a blindspot in whoever sets up 
the kerinng of Adobe's font (in Minion the spacing round the apostrophe is 
another flaw, rather worse than the parenthesis issue).  In view of the fact 
that one isn't supposed to tinker with these commercial fonts, I've several 
times asked if one might have a custom ligature option in XeTeX that could 
be included in the font calls, so that just as one can say 
'mapping=tex-text' one could say e.g. 'kerns=kernfile.KRN', the .KRN file 
containing any extra tweaks to the kerning that one cares to add, so that 
the font itself is left untouched.  This is possible in at least one 
implementation of TeX, but not (yet) in XeTeX - I think a few people at 
least said in the earlier thread that they would find it useful but I guess 
it hasn't been seen as a high priority.  It is a nuisance, though, as you 
say, if an otherwise attractive font becomes unusable.

Best


John

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Taylor Venable" <taylor at metasyntax.net>
To: "Unicode-based TeX for Mac OS X and other platforms" <xetex at tug.org>
Sent: Sunday, February 21, 2010 5:36 AM
Subject: Re: [XeTeX] Adobe Kepler Std: Extraneous space always inserted 
between left paren and f


> On Sat, 2010-02-20 at 23:50 -0500, David Perry wrote:
>> Do you have any other fonts that support OT features like ligatures?
>> Other Adobe fonts would perhaps be the best test.  If they work, then
>> it's probably not a XeTeX problem.
>
> I do, and they all work well, fortunately.  Just this one font is being
> problematic, and if it weren't for the fact that I type "(for example)"
> way too often I wouldn't mind much. :-)
>
>> The best test would be to try Kepler Pro in another application that
>> supports OT.  If you are on Linux, you may not have anything but XeTeX;
>> on Mac you can try TextEdit or Pages, or most of the Adobe apps
>> (InDesign, Illustrator, etc), which are cross-platform.  If Kepler Pro
>> does work properly in other OT-aware apps that can generate PDF, then we
>> do need to look at XeTeX again.  I don't have Kepler so I can't help 
>> much.
>
> OK, so I found that Abiword (a WYSIWYG word processor) supports OpenType
> fonts, and although it can't turn most of the features on/off it also
> exhibits the problem both in the visual layout (when entering text) and
> when saving to PDF.  However, Emacs is also capable of using OpenType
> fonts and produces it correctly (no extra space).  In GTK programs
> generally it's wrong, and in Qt programs it is wrong unless I highlight
> (select) the text, in which case it changes to be correct - the width of
> the text as a whole changes.
>
> Knowing that, it seems that XeTeX specifically is not at fault, or if it
> is then it's a really common issue.  I wonder if the blame lies in the
> font itself or in the layout system somewhere... hopefully I'll be able
> to secure an update to the latest version of the font files soon, and
> if/when I do I'll report back on any differences.  We have some Macs at
> work so I'll try to reproduce it there using Apple's layout engine.
>
> Thanks for the ideas.
>
> -- 
> Taylor Venable
> http://metasyntax.net/
>
>
>
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