[XeTeX] Kerning flaw with MinionPro & XeTex

John Was john.was at ntlworld.com
Sun Feb 6 13:11:09 CET 2011


Hello

I can't add anything on the technicalities involved in tweaking the kerning 
of fonts, but in a couple of previous threads I've asked if it might be 
possible to add a user-generated kern option (which would adjust and 
supplement rather than completely overwrite the kerning information in the 
font).  This (I understand) is possible in LuaTeX but I think the response 
was that XeTeX looks at the font information at a different point in the 
processing from LuaTeX, and it would be very difficult to feed in tweaks and 
adjustments after that point.  What I was hoping for was to load a font with 
something like "kerning=mykerns", just like "mapping=tex-text".  The user 
would then compile (to a predefined format) a file such as mykerns.krn, 
which would then feed the required information to XeTeX.

As things stand, I don't *think* it's legal to adjust the kerning in 
commercially supplied fonts (even those that may ship free with a product 
supplied by a firm such as Adobe).  But I'm no expert on the legalities 
(common sense would suggest that they should be glad of improvements 
introduced by users, but this may not be an area where common sense 
matters).

Best


John



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Alessandro Ceschini" <alessandroceschini.it at gmail.com>
To: "Kerning flaw with MinionPro & XeTex" <xetex at tug.org>
Sent: 06 February 2011 11:55
Subject: [XeTeX] Kerning flaw with MinionPro & XeTex


> Thank you, Peter. I tried but it's still far from being satisfying. Too
> much on the right now. Looking on FontForge the kerning set by designers
> for the combination of glyphs uni0423+uni0431.ital is -53. Previously
> Peter reported a kerning value of -183. However, I don't know if the
> units of measurement were the same, though.
>
>
>
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