Kern On

Is it also possible to remove shortcuts?

I don’t think any add-on should define its keyboard shortcut, to be honest. It has been like that for a very long time, and I have done that with my add-ons, but it never made much sense to me. Ideally, every user should simply set up their own shortcuts and that’s it. However, the whole shortcut sy...

Okay, I am slowly getting willing to implement a higher (or customizable) threshold for kerning values. Sometimes you just have to be persistent. ;-) The reason why I think a higher threshold would be beneficial is that it makes the kerning in woff/woff2 more compressible. It’s quite amazing how oth...

When you set models for pairs that include special spacing, Kern On determines the value for each special spacing group internally, by comparing all models. Typically, comparing the models for a special spacing group to the letter-letter models reveals that the special spacing value must be at least...

Yes, Kern On does take into account the zone above the cap height. Looking at your examples, giving V against A+diacritics somewhat looser kerning than VA does not seem unreasonable to me. If an exception has only a few units of difference (at which UPM, btw?) then maybe, instead of “unnecessary”, w...

Some parts of the code normalize things, and use the x-height as a measure of the “scale” of the font. If you have a font at 250 UPM you may have an x-height of less than 100, and if you draw at 4096 UPM it will be well over 1000, of course. I just had another look at the code and made additional te...

Yes, this has been discussed before:
viewtopic.php?t=180

It’s a bit unusual to get +1 and -1 values. What is the x-height of your font?

Here is what you can do: On the Kern On window there is a line that tells you how many model pairs you have, and a little arrow. If you click on that arrow it will show you a list of all models. If you select all text, then click on the “Auto” segment this will remove all models. You need to do this...

Yes, the data is stored in the font (-file), using Glyphs’ support for user data, as Sebastian pointed out. • Models, independents and user-set autopairs are stored in the master’s user data. • The special spacing (or no kerning) information is stored in the individual glyph’s user data. • Some othe...

Thanks for the explanation, Jeremy. It seems we are both right, in a way. Let me explain: Before Kern On v 1.20 (from February 2023), pairs were generated only on the basis of codepoints and OT features, i.e. those that can be accessed by users, as you describe. However, some users (including myself...

Yes, this is intentional. Latin, Cyrillic and Greek will go into the same subtable, the other scripts will be separated.
Related: https://forum.glyphsapp.com/t/cyrillic-kerning/1286/23

That said, in order to get a feeling for the lossiness of the final kerning depending on the chosen kB, we can make use of the fact that the comparison function literally refers to the kerning stored in the other font and compares it to the immediate, un-compressed live autokerning values in the cur...

Agreed, selecting the kerning volume is a bit of a strange question to ask the user but after all, KO is a little robot so it needs instructions. I am planning to re-work the dialogue somewhat. As far as I can see, we have several distinct scenarios: Exporting single-style desktop fonts. In this cas...

I already thought about somehow considering the exported-ness of glyphs but this needs a little clarification. Can you give an example? It seems you have glyphs that are non-exporting, but you chose not to give them “No kerning” as you want them autokerned. This probably means they are used in ligat...

Is there any fundamental guide how to group the whole glyphs? Or it works automatically? While Kern On is running, there are no kerning groups, only glyph-glyph kerning. Also, only the currently visible pairs are autokerned on-the-fly. As you type in more text, Kern On will generate the necessary p...

Looks like this issue is related to your OS version. I specified to build Kern On for macOS 10.11 or later but it seems this is not really guaranteed to work. Sorry, I will try to find a solution but it’s not going to be easy as I don’t have a computer with an old version to test this.

Sorry to hear you are having problems.

The whole dialog looks funny. Which version of Glyphs and macOS are you using?

Btw, I believe this makes one of your scripts unnecessary:
https://github.com/eweracs/glyphs-scrip ... topairs.py

Thanks for pointing this out. It seems you have numr and dnom letters, right? Never knew that was a thing. ;-) The reason for the inconsistent behaviour is that Glyphs says that these are lowercase letters. That’s somewhat debatable, I’d say but never mind. As (real) lowercase gets a special treatme...

I don't quite understand why Kern On kerns maths operators amongst each other in the first place Good question. I am open to discussing this. Would you prefer to not kern maths operators against each other at all? What exactly is the reasoning? How about things like “C++”? Or “x += 1”? Or things li...

Thanks for taking your time to write such an thorough feedback! It has taken me a while to write a thorough answer ;-) Some questions are a not easy to answer without seeing the font. Is it a sans or a serif design? with 150-250 models per master That seems like a lot of models. Again, without seein...

The latest KO version (1.19) should work fine with Glyphs 3.2. Do you want to update and see whether it works for you? https://kern-on.com/update/

I am not sure I understand what is going on. Is /a/n a model? Maybe you want to send me the font? Keep in mind that whenever you are not happy with an auto pair you can make it a model with the value you consider correct. Independent pairs should not be used for fixing what you are showing in your i...

Thanks for reporting this! Yes, it is indeed related to Glyphs 3.2. (It’s not the only change in Glyphs that causes problems with Kern On and the Remix Tools). I’ll try to find a work-around and update Kern On, or discuss with Georg to re-establish support for the existing versions of the plug-ins. ...

Thanks for the help, Sebastian! Matthew, are you using the latest version of Kern On? (Currently it’s v 1.18 from 20 Nov 2022.) Which kerning size (in kB) were you using? Have you tried increasing it? To refine the explanation: • Kern On only kerns pairs that it thinks can occur in real life. You ca...

The cause of confusion is that for everything else I have to change values with the mouse on the slider. Everywhere except here, where you can not use the mouse on the slider. Well, for models you can change values with the mouse on the slider. The methods I mentioned above always work. That said, ...

For independent pairs, you can set the value by typing a number into the kerning value field on the Kern On panel by using the cursor keys in this field (plus Shift or Cmd+Shift as desired) by typing into the kerning value field on Glyphs’ built-in Info panel by using the cursor keys in this field (...

If you just click on the “Ind.” segment that should set an independent model, no?

Sorry, major edits to the font while Kern On is running should be avoided. Things like deleting masters or deleting, creating or re-naming glyphs are not supported. Kern On explicitly supports editing the kerning via Glyphs, editing the sidebearings, and editing the contours while it is running. Thi...

I think I realised what causes the confusion. Generally, you can use the Glyphs UI to set kerning values (including keyboard shortcuts and the little text box for the value). If a pair is an auto pair then it will switch to model once you change it via Glyphs. So, the shortcuts should work. However,...

Sorry about this. I have never experienced this myself (although I am currently working with KO quite frequently) but I think I identified a potential issue in the code and made it more robust. It will be in the next release.

> When two glyphs have the same base I assume you are referring to two accented glyphs with the same base letter? Since they do not have the same shape (including the accents), combining them in the same kerning group usually leads to additional glyph-glyph pairs (exceptions) while eliminating the c...

Okay, sorry, the algorithm is still not perfect. In November, I have spent a few weeks refining it but there is still some scope for improvement. The kerning groups in Kern On are not hard-coded at all. To determine whether merging groups makes sense, Kern On looks the kerning values and determines ...

Hello Philip, sorry to hear you lost some data. Maybe to me, it is too obvious that one would keep a copy of the file when trying a new tool. Warning the user is a good idea, I just added a note to the dialog that explicitly says that the kerning groups will be reset. Btw, there has been some discus...

You are right, support for numr, dnom, sups, subs and sinf is not very refined yet. As a general principle, Kern On has a list of Unicode pairs, which is then “extended” by applying all sort of features (in all sorts of combinations), to generate additional glyph-glyph pairs. “All sorts” has a few t...

Not sure what exactly is happening. As you start Kern On, all autokerning is removed (only models and independents are kept). While Kern On is running, all the necessary kerning (i.e. for the text you type into the editor) is generated on-the-fly.

Sorry about this. When Glyphs crashed, did you send a crash report? Then I can ask Georg to send it to me, which greatly helps find the problem in the code. When macOS asks you to send a crash report, you can also click on Send , then copy the report and send it to my by e-mail (at that point you ca...

Hi Claus, are you using the latest version (1.18)?

for whatever reason, decides that two glyphs should be in the same kern group, even if the shapes aren't identical, then Kern-On can just use one of the glyphs in the set and ignore the rest. Yes, one would try to keep the UI as simple as possible, and to support the designer’s thinking that the pa...

Sorry to hear this. Without analysing this on my computer, it’s difficult to say what’s going on. Which version of Kern On are you using? Version v 1.16 included some fixes for problems such as the one you are showing in the screenshot.

Hello Aaron, yes, extending existing, kerned fonts is something Kern On does not handle well yet. It’s definitely something I want to take care of as it’s a reasonable scenario to assume. So, expect some support for that in the future. One feature I want to implement in any case are “bubbles”, i.e. ...

Thanks for your contributions to the discussion, everyone! Eben, I just played around with Pinyon, using your source file from Github. (Quick note unrelated to Kern On: the current version of Glyphs 3 fails to compile the features because of the glyph named “NULL”. Deleting the glyph fixes the featu...

Sorry, I haven’t tried this before but I think it may work with Kern On. Have you tried? Let us know how it works for you! Just keep in mind that the idea is to simply adjust the kerning (i.e. set an additional model) for any autokerning you don’t like.

I assume the “Kern On” button at the bottom of the window was grayed out (i.e. visible but disabled)? This happens if there is a red-dot message shown, then Kern On does not allow any editing until you have looked at the mismatch (by clicking on the little arrow) or ignored it. If you “click away” a...

More generally, as SCarewe mentioned, if any autokerning is not according to your taste, simply try setting a model. You have probably spaced the punctuation more loosely than the letters. In that case, you need to let Kern On know by setting “special spacing” for the punctuation (don’t forget to do...

it leads to upper quotes being kerned more than half the width of the period for example, which I find problematic. Really? Yes, that’s problematic, and this is exactly why Kern On has a limit of (minus) half the smaller advance width (of the two glyphs). That applies only to autokerned pairs. For ...

I couldn't find documentation online, but I was wondering if either of you knew the rough upper limit of how many kerning pairs the OpenType kerning table should roughly accept? The limit is 64 kB unless you use Extension Kerning. It’s not possible to give a number of pairs: Each class-class pair d...

Hi Eben, what exactly do you have in mind? Do you mean copying the sidebearings from one master to the other? Would they have very similar shapes?

If your metrics are shared between masters you could use the custom parameter “Link Metrics With Master”. Then Kern On will understand your intention and use identical kerning. See also this post.

Would that work in your case?

Also, it would be good to know or see more about your project. Maybe this is in fact an XY problem? There might be a better solution than creating 23M kerning pairs but it’s difficult to say without knowing enough details about the project. I suppose it is some kind of experiment or art project?

I don’t think exporting a font with 23M kerning pairs is feasible with current technology. It’s interesting to see how hardware and software continues to becomes more powerful and users still push the boundaries, I guess they always will. If, in 20 years time, producing a font with 5000 glyphs and 2...

Yes, you can simply say “No kerning for whiteFrowningFace, please”, like this:

: Screenshot 2022-10-11 at 13.42.03.png (80.28 KiB) Viewed 5677 times

SCarewe wrote: ↑30 Sep 2022 Hello, I have been running into an issue since a few Kern On versions

Don’t exaggerate! 😉 Yes, this is a bug in the latest version. I have already fixed it in the code, and this fix will be included in the next release, of course.

Chris, it seems you have a simple solution for your problem in mind, which I fail to see. Sorry about this. I am sure Kern On will improve (in many different aspects) in the next years but I don’t see any solution I can implement in a snap.

SCarewe wrote: ↑22 Sep 2022 You essentially don't have control, no.

Well, you do have control (via user-set autopairs) but you don’t have a preview. This seems to be the main problem here.

chrisjansky wrote: ↑22 Sep 2022 but can we agree that these colliding pairs should not be outputted into the final font?

They are colliding because the exceptions are not outputted into the final font. I tried to explain that above.

Okay, first thing:

chrisjansky wrote: ↑22 Sep 2022 Can you advise on how to prevent such behaviour? Should I assign "Model = 0" for those colliding pairs?

No. The best solution would be to turn them into a user-set autopair, as I explained above.

Regarding user-set classes, this has come up every so often. I See the other thread for my answer: /viewtopic.php?p=1269#p1269

Interesting question. All possible combinations for 5000 glyphs is 25 million pairs. Not sure whether the system will cope with this but let’s try our luck. My first try would be working with user-set autopairs. As you may know, you can explicitly switch an ignored pair (i.e. without any of the Mode...

Hello Brian, what happens if you click “Try again” a few times?

It’s difficult to say without having the file. If you want you can send it to me. In any case, if the design and metrics of the /O is exactly the same as the /zero then you should not set /zero/zero as well as /O/O as models – one is enough. What happens if you simply switch /zero/zero to auto? Whic...

From Kern On’s point of view, “ignored” means “the value does not matter”. It seems when you say “should be ignored” you mean “should have a value of zero”? When Kern On finalizes the font (after you click “Kern On”), it first autokerns all relevant glyph-glyph pairs (those pairs it considers “real-...

I don’t quite understand what you are worried about.

chrisjansky wrote: ↑20 Sep 2022 "emdash-eogonek" which is arguably a real combination

I don’t think it is, as eogonek does not occur at the beginning of words.

Btw, this is one of the sources I used when compiling the list of pairs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark#Summary_table As you can see, quotesinglbase doesn’t seem to be used as a closing quotation mark for any Latin-based language. If there is something I missed I’m happy to learn about...

Thanks for sending the file. The second pair in your example is a-quotesinglbase. This pair is not in Kern On’s internal list of pairs, it is simply not in the system. As you can see, none of the “Model”, “Auto”, “Ind[ependent]” buttons are activated. Kern On thinks a-quotesinglbase will never be us...

If you select 64kB or less then you should not get the error, so something is going wrong somewhere.

Which version of Glyphs are you using? Is it the same error in Glyphs 2 and Glyphs 3?

Would you mind sending me the .glyphs file? Thanks!

Thanks for your kind words! Sebastian’s explanations are very good (thanks for the script btw!) but I’ll try to dig in a little deeper. Regarding your issues, I understand the problems you are facing but it’s not easy to improve things from my side: As Kern On starts, it deletes kerning groups as we...

It seems you are mostly worried about the naming of the classes? Not sure I understand your problem but if B and O are in the same class then what should be the name of the class? It it wrong to call it KO_B?

Yes, the result should be identical if you re-run Kern On. If it wasn’t then this would be a bug (but I do not think there is any potential for unintended side effects from additional glyphs in the font).

Sorry this is taking longer than would be convenient. I will have a look at your file and see whether it can be improved. You are right, the time it takes to calculate the kerning and the class generation is non-linear. The number of pairs to autokern is roughly proportional to the square of the num...

Can you try exporting the font with Glyphs (ideally, try exporting with Glyphs 2 and Glyphs 3)? If the fonts are generated by Glyphs without any problems then we can conclude that the problem must be with Fontmake, I suppose.

Just a quick guess: In Kern On, did you set the kerning size to more than 64kB?

Thanks for the file! I just fixed the crash, it was not related to anything particular in your file, just a common small coding bug (integer underflow, to be precise) that lead KO to book an extremely large amount of memory in rare cases.

You can get the update from https://kern-on.com/update/

Would you mind sending me the .glyphs file? Then I can have a closer look. Thanks!

Hello Fran, 50GB does sound too much indeed. I can have another look at the RAM usage here on various computers.

What exactly is the problem you are experiencing? Is Kern On or Glyphs crashing? Is it unexpectedly slow?

Just a quick recap: As discussed by e-mail, the reason for the inconsistent autokerning was that some letters accidentally has special spacing. I just implemented a dialogue that will warn the user if they set special spacing for letters – which, by concept, should never be necessary. So, it is stil...

That said, the above rules are not set in stone. In fact, together with Georg, I have worked on concepts to optimize the kerning subtables, which saved about a quarter of data size compared to Glyphs’ current simple-and-robust approach. Maybe we’ll sit down again and work out how subtables could be ...

Hi Dino! In Glyphs, glyphs from different scripts cannot be in the same kerning class. This has something to do with how Glyphs divides the kerning into subtables when you export a font. While Kern On creates the kerning classes, it is aware of these subtables that will be created by Glyphs (in fact...

Sorry to hear about the missing pairs. Initially, I implemented and tested the generation of OT feature based pairs in Glyphs 2, and then found that Glyphs 3 writes some kinds of substitutions differently from Glyphs 2. I am aware that the implementation for Glyphs 3 – for complex substitutions – ma...

This sounds strange indeed. Are the shapes of the ligatures really identical to the letters?

Maybe you could send me the .glyphs file, then I can have a closer look!

This is an example: Entering “/H/d” as the LSB of the three will adjust the LSB so that H-three and d-three have zero kerning. At the moment, this is temporary, the “/H/d” will disappear. I am planning to implement something permanent, though.

: Screenshot 2022-07-21 at 06.51.29.png (227.72 KiB) Viewed 16183 times

Yes, I will record a video soon!

Not sure without seeing this but yes, you are probably right. In your font, the distance from H to period is probably smaller than from period to H. You can play around with the measurement tool to check this. This teaches us that slanting a correctly spaced upright does not necessarily lead to a co...

It’s been a while but I made some progress with some sort of autospacing. Let’s use this thread, I think “Normalise kerning to spacing” is a very good description of what we are talking about. As I wrote above, there are several possible approaches, each with their pros and cons. What I have tried: ...

Thanks for the kind words!

There is an internal threshold for the kerning value but you can’t modify it. This question has been discussed here: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=180

Hello Arthur, if Kern On really insists that your LH is inconsistent with other models then I’d strongly recommend to try to fix that. Note that you can use the “try again” button or simply set the model again (which has exactly the same effect), and maybe you will find a different pair that is the ...

Hello Kostas, would you mind sending me the .glyphs file? Then I can have a closer look, and hopefully find the root of the problem. Thanks!

Btw, there is some information in the Under the Hood video at around 4:30.

Hi Eben, Kern On applies your OT features and generates all relevant kerning pairs. No need to manually transfer any kerning. Btw, KO ignores the glyph names, all it needs is the OT features. If there are any missing pairs, i.e. glyph-glyph pairs that you think should be kerned, but KO is not autoke...

Thanks for your feedback! Here are some comments: The main problem is with glyphs that have the same class but different contours, Right now the class kerning is optimized for storage, not for humans to look at. It ignores pairs that will never occur in real life (or so it believes). More and more, ...

Sorry about this! Not sure whether it was caused by the fact that you had components. Composites are generally supported by KO. Can you still reproduce the problem (using an old file)? My feeling is that you made edits to the font while Kern On was running, and Kern On did not properly update the in...

What I am not sure about yet is whether and how to allow for additional models in the autokerned master. It could be frustrating if you find out that “autokern from master” generally works for you but there is a handful of pairs that get wrong kerning. What do do in this case? (1) Strictly no additi...

Thanks for your comments, Sebastian! Here are some answers: When setting a master to be autokerned from another source, Kern On deletes all models done up until then. This means that one cannot revert to the manually made models after checking out how it would kern from another source. This action i...

Seems that would be #3 from my list above ? I should definitely tackle that but adding support for kerning triplets isn’t trivial. Kern On needs to write feature code, which is not too difficult, but it has to do so for each instance/export individually, as “manual” kerning code is not interpolated ...

Sorry if this message is confusing. "Keep", meaning I keep the current (target) master values? Yes. Or do I "keep" the values from the other master, and overwrite the values in the current master? No. Or do I keep (stop) the values from being overwritten by the other master's val...

Sorry about the late reply. Would you mind sending me the file? Kern On uses the same interpolation coefficients as Glyphs. Can you try using “Re-interpolate” from the layers palette on the Compressed Regular master? Does it look roughly the same in terms of weight and width (except for corrections)...

No need to write your own .fea code. The auto-generated OT features in Glyphs will do!

Kern On ignores glyph names. Instead, it “applies” the OT features to the list of Unicode pairs. As long as your Glyphs have Unicode values assigned and you have set up the OT features the autokerning should be complete. Just let me know if you think something is missing. I suggest to have a look at...

It seems in the world of font-making tools, there are two schools of thought: Assume that each user has different needs and personal preferences of how to do things and, therefore, allow customizations – and even encourage them. This seems to be the RoboFont reasoning, as fas as I have understood. A...

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