You said, “The word lists I use were found in various places on-line, usually made by designers who speak that language.”
Do you have a kerning list in your possession for Western and Central European characters that account for the glyphs I mentioned (Ð, Ľ, Ł, Ø, Þ)? If so, are you willing to post it here? If not, are you able to help me find one?
Wikipedia speaks about the historical origins of characters and provides information about their use. However, Wikipedia isn’t helpful for making a list of kerning words (especially if you know nothing about foreign languages).
Take this sentence for example: In Old English, ⟨ð⟩ (called ðæt ) was used interchangeably with ⟨þ⟩ to represent the Old English dentalfricativephoneme /θ/ or its allophone /ð/, which exist in modern English phonology as the voiced and voiceless dental fricatives both now spelled “th”.
With all due respect, if I attempted to derive a list of kerning words from information like this, I would end up going down an information rabbit hole and not getting done what I need to get done.
I apologize for the long-winded discussion but I need at least one of these three things:
A free kerning tool/plugin that has high-quality user documentation which will help me properly kern my problem characters (Ð, Ľ, Ł, Ø, Þ).
A premade list of kerning pairs/words for Western and Central Europe that accounts for my problem characters (Ð, Ľ, Ł, Ø, Þ).
Digestible information that will help me derive a list of kerning pairs/words that will account for my problem characters (Ð, Ľ, Ł, Ø, Þ)
Alternatively, I could ask ChatGPT to make me the list I need but I don’t trust it completely. I don’t know if there is somebody else I could run it by to verify its comprehensiveness.
Not sure what such a list should do. For group kerning, make sure any combo works, because you also need to cover abbreviations and things like isolated letters with punctuation. There’s loads of scripts to help you with this.
I was told by a friend of mine who’s a professional type designer and university design professor that you should always kern with real words and not pairs if possible. This is why I’m asking around for a list to see whats out there. He recommended resources like Jonathan Hoefler’s kerning proofs. However, It doesn’t account for some of my European characters.
You friend is kind of right, but there’s a nuance: to kern a pair you need to make sure everything around it is well spaced and kerned, which makes finding words, (especially “universal” ones) tricky. All you really need is a reference of good spacing and it doesn’t have to be a real word.
To kern AV put it between HOHAVHOH and make sure HAV and AVH look just as good as HOH (which is a basic spacing pair which can’t be wrong at this point).
I think it’s hard to really know what you’re doing when using other people’s word lists like that, because you don’t know how complete it is, what’s the logic behind and so on.
Also, there are actually very few pairs featuring non-basic chars that need special treatment, so chances are you’ll spend more time trying to find a solution than building it.
Those characters are very basic in design so probably would fit well in their basic character kerning group.
But you want a list, so I’m providing you with the resources needed to make your own since my list was derived from several lists and were adjusted by me to eliminate countries with very small populations of people who spoke the language. That is some of what I researched during my time down the rabbit hole of alphabets and languages. I’m not sure if my lists would be of any help to you.
and download the ZIP file in the drop-down under “Code”. It contains many word lists ranging from a basic 50K words up to at least 228K words. The files in the Content folder are what you will be interested in.
Use the Unicode CLDR file to determine which language(s) you want lists for, using the two-letter Country Code. Then go to that sub-folder in the Content folder with the same country code.
Choose the file you want to work with using a text editor to search for the characters of interest. From that point you can make your list.
No, that’s not the purpose of my generator. There are other scripts that create strings with all possible combinations of certain glyphs. (In fact, it’s very easy to write. Would be a nice educational project if you can’t find any script that suits you.)