Roman and Italic

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Jeremy
Posts: 7
Joined: 04 Jan 2021

Roman and Italic

Post by Jeremy »

In order to maintain a harmony of spacign between Roman and Italic I presume you need to set up KO in the Italic to match the Roman. If the Italic is a sloped Roman style then this is perhaps more of a requirement.

Is the an easy way to copy all the Models and Independent pairs from one file to another (Import KO)?
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Tim Ahrens
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Posts: 404
Joined: 11 Jul 2019

Re: Roman and Italic

Post by Tim Ahrens »

To transfer models between fonts, you can first show the list of models using the little arrow in the bottom section of the Kern On panel. Then, copy and paste the text into the other font, select them all and switch them to models. This does not transfer the values, of course, just their model-ness. In a similar way, you can transfer models between masters (without the need for copy and paste, of course).

Would you want to transfer the values as well? To do this, after setting the models, you could close the Kern On palette to deactivate it, then copy and paste the kerning from the other font (or master) using the kerning palette (cmd+alt+K), then switch on KO again.

This works because KO only stores which model pairs there are but not their values. The values are stored in Glyphs’ official kerning. If you change the values while KO is sleeping they will be updated when it wakes up again.

I was wondering whether it’s worth making this transfer a built-in function. It wouldn’t be difficult.

Btw, there is a built-in function to transfer the special spacing between fonts. You can find it in the little button next to the “Compare to” button when two fonts are open.
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SCarewe
Posts: 100
Joined: 23 Apr 2021

Re: Roman and Italic

Post by SCarewe »

Hello, I am currently kerning a project with an italic which is essentially just slanted with minor optical corrections on curves. Having made around 240 models, I am desperately trying to figure out a way to transfer models including their values to my italic file. As each file has five masters (alright, with one set to interpolate), it is very tedious trying to copy everything by hand.

First, I tried to copy the kerning from the kerning table from the roman file (in "modelling mode", so just around 60 kerning values per master) to the italic file, because I thought that KO saves the model status + values in that form. Please correct me if this is wrong, as I am planning some scripts to work with KO and you would save me a lot of Haareraufen :)

Then, I tried like you described above:
I copied the model pairs as plain text to the other file, selected all, then clicked Model to make them models. Then, I copied the kern table values from the roman file to the italic in order to give KO the correct model values. This somewhat works, although KO constantly rejects models that you need to adjust by hand (understandable, but very annoying when copying models in bulk, as you can only edit the values after clicking "OK" twenty times for all the rejected models).

I would be delighted if 1) it were possible to explain how KO saves the model status for a respective file, whether this is somehow accessible by scripting (or not intended to be, which I could also understand) and 2) whether there is the possibility of transferring models including values from file to file in an easier way.

Thank you very much, as always!
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