I am trying to create a unicase font where the kerning pairs are the same across upper and lowercase.
So if a person types ‘Man’, ‘MAN’, ‘man’ or ‘mAN’ there will be no change in kerning.
I have gone through my font and created all kerning pairs from uppercase to uppercase (eg. ‘MAN’) and copied these kerning pairs to the lowercase characters, so I have lowercase to lowercase kerning pairs that are the same (eg. ‘man’).
Now I need to get the uppercase to lowercase kerning pairs (eg. ‘Man’) and the lowercase to uppercase kerning pairs (eg. mAN).
I hope you understand what I am trying to do. I am new to Glyphs and I haven’t created kerning groups, rather have individually created each kerning pair.
This is definitely the case where you benefit from kerning groups. With it, you do not have to copy any pairs. You basically need to assign the same name to the same (or similar) glyphs.
In your case, the left kerning group of A and a will be A. The right will be the same too. If you have diacritic letters, you also put all of the variants (e.g. Á À Ä Â Å á à ä â å…) to the same groups.
For another example, I normally group D with other letters (i.e. H and O). So, My left group of D is H, and the right group will be O. And if it’s a normal uppercase design, I’d put B D E F H I K L M N P R in the same left kerning group which I call H here, because they are all stems on the left. The lowercase will have the same group setting.
After setting groups, you need to convert what you have done already to group-related pairs. You don’t need to understand what that means for now; just open Window > Kerning, click the cog icon at the bottom right, and choose Compress. Now any combination should be working.