Kerning in Office Excel

Did anyone figure out what the deal with Excel and kerning is? A font with kerning works in Word, but not excel…

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I’d be surprised if Excel and PowerPoint supported GPOS at all.

PowerPoint supports kerning, Excel doesn’t.

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Ppt: But only oldstyle kern tables, right?

No, it supports GPOS alright, unless the font is TrueType.
Sick ey :slight_smile:

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Thank you for this valuable input, i didn’t know this. And how ironic. So it supports GPOS in CFF fonts, and kern in TTF?

Yup.
Calibri has a kern table in addition to GPOS, something I strongly advice against. GPOS is supported at the heart of Windows for ages, let them finally fix their presentation app. PowerPoint can embed TrueType but not PostScript, maybe there is a connection between these historic oddities.

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It seems that Word 2003 supports GPOS kerning in OTF fonts generated from Fontlab, but not from Glyphs. Any thoughts on this, @LucasFonts and @mekkablue?

I don’t have Word 2003, so I cannot verify. Can you send me the two OTFs?

Word 2003 in 2018? That’s impressive. Mac or PC?
Many factors involved.
It could be the font has a kerning pairs for a glyph that has no Unicode.
Assign Unicodes to all (which FontLab might do automatically on export) or remove kerning for unencoded glyphs.

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I tested the same font, once exported from Glyphs and once from Fontlab. Fontlab works.
Yes, Word 2003 on PC. A client has a content management system for newspaper setting, and it’s the same story there. So I suppose it’s also the same problem…

Wild guess: GPOS extension lookups are maybe not supported by the newspaper setting system. If I remember correctly, Glyphs uses them automatically if necessary if the kerning would not compile without extension.

There are a few minor differences between the FLS and Glyphs font. The only major difference I see in GPOS is the presence of mark attachment (mark and mkmk). You can try adding a Remove Features parameter with this as value:

mark
mkmk