I’m currently working on a font and I have two questions:
I adjusted the sidebearings on my characters, and they look quite nice and work well in smaller sizes. However, I feel like it’s missing something to make it unique and properly work on paragraphs. I understand that’s where kerning comes, but I’m not entirely sure how to find the pairs to make the optical adjustments without making the spacing too tight and unreadable.
The objective of my font is to have wide support for Latin and European languages, at least the ones that use the Latin letters. Is there a comprehensive list of characters I must include? I already gone full basic Latin, chapters with acute, grave, breve, dierisis, dot, bar and a couple of other diacritics. I didn’t do the germanbdls yet, and I haven’t dived too deep on IPA.
Most of the time I feel fonts have something that makes them unique, stand out from the crowd, when it come to kerning. I don’t know how to achieve that, because I’m not entirely sure how to do optical adjustments. I tough about trying every possible combination of glyphs and make the kerning, but that feels out of hand.
Also, when I mentioned paragraphs I meant longer texts, such as this one, webpages, books and others, on smaller sizes (10-16 pt). Like how people use avenir, arial, roboto and other fonts.
I disagree. Can you give some example? Kerning should be invisible, ideally.
Essentially, kerning is just about equalising the spacing for pairs where the default spacing doesn’t work. That you need to do by eye. So, essentially, just look at lots and lots of lines of text and adjust the pairs that look off.
I checked a couple of very commonly used fonts and noticed they have 3000+ kerning pairs, and while doing some research I found it’s a very common practice to have this many pairs on a font. It also can be a bit confusing when switching apps, given that every app has a different rendering system, even among writing apps such as pages or word.
I will dive deeper in the tutorial, thanks for the real
You should bear in mind that fonts that have that many kerning pairs are often kerned algorithmically and not done by hand. 3000 is excessive for manual kerning and definitely not necessary most of the time. You should aim for as few kerning pairs as possible and work on your spacing until you can’t solve problems anymore apart from by kerning.
It does make sense to kern all letter combinations within the given script, excluding pairs with language-specific letters (like Þß). For punctuation and symbols that’s excessive and it’s better to take into account how they are used. There are gray areas like do you want to kern lowercase to uppercase or something like & to letters, which is seldom used (mostly for names like YouTube or AT&T), or is it better to add kerning only for those popular brands and add the rest upon request?
In my view, about 1500 pairs for a sans (depending on the style’s sensitivity to the negative space, 1000–2000) is more reasonable.