Kerning groups mystery

Hi,
I am working on a font with, among other languages, Vietnamese in it. I have set the metrics for the base glyphs (a, c, d, e etc), then created all the ones with diacritics and added them to their respective kerning groups. Like a, acircumflex, adiereses, agrave, etc. - all of these are in a group.
I kerned the ‘a’ against other glyphs and noticed that when I type in a text in Vietnamese, the accented a’s are NOT kerned. Why is that???
I batch added all the a’s - I selected them all and put ‘a’ in left and right group - which should have done the trick. But it didn’t. Any ideas?

  1. If you added Vietnamese letters after doing kerning groups, you might have missed.
  2. If you kerned before setting groups, the pairs are not group based yet. See if the ‘a’-related pairs in kerning window shows up as ‘a’ in grey or ‘@a’ (or whatever your group name is) in navy blue. The latter is the group value.

@Tosche :flushed: - I added those Vietnamese glyphs after In did some kerning (I am still learning how to use Glyphs). I typed in ‘a’ in kerning window and the only pair that has an @ in front is the @i - a pair. That is bizarre

In Edit View, place the text cursor between the a and the other glyph. The gray Info box shows the kerning value. Next to it is a lock :lock:. Ensure the lock is closed, otherwise the pair is a kerning exception. See the Kerning tutorial and the handbook for details.

@FlorianPircher - I did actually check the lock!! It is closed, so all the accented a’s should follow the base a. I have a few exceptions, but they’re the ohorn and uhorn, so they shouldn’t interfere with what is happening with the a-family

The lock is closed for all pairs with the a and the value in the Info box is the same?

@FlorianPircher - to my knowledge, yes, the lock was there. I just erased my a-kerning from the kerning panel and I will start over…

If you still have the old Glyphs file, send it to support @ this website domain (or send it as a personal message here on the forum) and we’ll figure out what was missing and report back.

@FlorianPircher - I deleted all the kerning pairs - no problem, as I just started kerning the font. I think Toschi’s suggestion that it might have been a group-based problem is correct; i.e. I should have created all the accented glyphs before I started kerning. I thought that adding additional glyphs to a kerning group would mean these new glyphs would automatically follow the rest. It works like that in Fontlab where you can add or remove glyphs at random, as long as you ‘clean up’ the group afterwards and regenerate the kerning feature.