What is your recommendation for kB in "limit kerning to"?
Posted: 05 Aug 2022
I am presented with a difficult question each time I use Kern On: how many kB should I limit kerning to?
I understand that it is a logical setting for you to include, as I'm sure that first challenge to any auto-kerning system is that "it adds junk data and too many pairs." However, I suspect that very few type designers have a strong knowledge of or opinion about how precisely many kilobytes of kerning should be included in a given font. In general, I suspect that we want as much kerning as is necessary for a high-quality result, and no more. How should we know how many kilobytes that will take?
I don't mean to be overly challenging, I am merely expressing that I feel like KernOn should help a user understand how to decide how much to limit kerning. I don't pretend it's an easy answer! But, I'm sure there are various tradeoffs made to reach a certain limit ... maybe those could be somewhat exposed to the user?
For instance, I could imagine a series of toggles, with options for categories like "kern UC-UC, kern UC-lc, kern lc-UC, kern UC-numerals, kern UC-lc diacritics" etc ... and toggling different categories on and off would update a predicted amount of kerning data.
Since there isn't currently that preference panel, can you help me to understand what limit I should be setting? I am happy to email my current Glyphs file to you, but here are some specifics on it:
- There are 8 masters (4 upright, 4 sloped-roman italics)
- There are glyphs to fill out the Google Fonts Latin Plus and Cyrillic Plus glyphsets, with a few additions and subtractions. In this particular font, there are 990 glyphs.
- 418 glyphs have at least one contour that is drawn/editable, and the other 572 are purely composed
- It's a "marker" font, so glyphs have relatively irregular sides. That is, the left side of the D is slightly different from the left side of the H, and so on (screenshot attached of the basic Latin in the light style, to give a general sense of it).
Thanks for any suggestions and insights!
As one extra point of feedback: it seems that my preference for "limit kerning" isn't stored in the font, so I have to consider it each time from the 36 kB default. Ideally, I think, once I come up with a limit, that would be suggested next time I run it.
I understand that it is a logical setting for you to include, as I'm sure that first challenge to any auto-kerning system is that "it adds junk data and too many pairs." However, I suspect that very few type designers have a strong knowledge of or opinion about how precisely many kilobytes of kerning should be included in a given font. In general, I suspect that we want as much kerning as is necessary for a high-quality result, and no more. How should we know how many kilobytes that will take?
I don't mean to be overly challenging, I am merely expressing that I feel like KernOn should help a user understand how to decide how much to limit kerning. I don't pretend it's an easy answer! But, I'm sure there are various tradeoffs made to reach a certain limit ... maybe those could be somewhat exposed to the user?
For instance, I could imagine a series of toggles, with options for categories like "kern UC-UC, kern UC-lc, kern lc-UC, kern UC-numerals, kern UC-lc diacritics" etc ... and toggling different categories on and off would update a predicted amount of kerning data.
Since there isn't currently that preference panel, can you help me to understand what limit I should be setting? I am happy to email my current Glyphs file to you, but here are some specifics on it:
- There are 8 masters (4 upright, 4 sloped-roman italics)
- There are glyphs to fill out the Google Fonts Latin Plus and Cyrillic Plus glyphsets, with a few additions and subtractions. In this particular font, there are 990 glyphs.
- 418 glyphs have at least one contour that is drawn/editable, and the other 572 are purely composed
- It's a "marker" font, so glyphs have relatively irregular sides. That is, the left side of the D is slightly different from the left side of the H, and so on (screenshot attached of the basic Latin in the light style, to give a general sense of it).
Thanks for any suggestions and insights!
As one extra point of feedback: it seems that my preference for "limit kerning" isn't stored in the font, so I have to consider it each time from the 36 kB default. Ideally, I think, once I come up with a limit, that would be suggested next time I run it.