Kern differently between Virtual Masters?

1

Kern differently between Virtual Masters in a Variable font? Is it possible to implement?

2

Not currently.

3

Hello! Sorry to reopen an old post, but I was wondering if this still the case? Are there recommended workarounds for kerning exceptions for a virtual master?

4

I have some ideas but nothing to show, yet.

What kind of virtual master do you have that requires kerning?

5

I have a virtual master for an x-height axis, and there are some combinations of upper + lower (such as Yn) characters that I’d like to kern differently for the larger x-height. I know a workaround would be create a different master for the different x-height altogether, but because only the lowercase characters are changing, having whole duplicate masters seems like it would make an unnecessarily large file (especially in combination with other axes.) Do you have any recommendations for this? Thanks again!

6

You could fiddle around with some custom kerning code. But that would not work for variable fonts.

7

Hi There!

I’m wondering if there’s been any progress on this in Glyphs 3, or whether having different kerning for virtual masters is on the roadmap in the near future. We’re working on a font with 9 masters and 9 virtual masters, and we’d like kerning and mark features to interpolate across virtual masters, so any update you can share would be super useful.

Our usecase is exactly what MarieOtsuka mentioned above; we have an x-height axis as virtual amsters that requires some kerning fine-tuning across the character set, as well as top mark interpolation across lower-case as the x-height changes.

Thanks!

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8

I have thought about this but have not implemented it.

9

Got it, thanks! We’re considering building our own layer to handle this, but we’d prefer to use a GlyphsApp-native implementation, if possible. Any chance you’re planning to think more about it and implement something for Glyphs3 in the next year or so?

10

For those tricky problems, I need to be reminded once in a while ;).

11

Hello Georg,

I was wondering if there were any updates on this feature? Seems like we keep bumping into the same problem with different projects. There are a lot of projects with axis that are only controlling a subset of glyphs—I’m wondering if everyone is just repeating glyphs? The virtual masters are working great but we would like to adjust kerning too if possible :slight_smile:

Thank you!

12

Thanks for the reminder.

13

Thank you for the help, please keep us posted if there are any updates on this :slight_smile:

14

There will be some changes to how Virtual masters work and that will help with the kerning. Can’t give details right now.

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