Kerning Not Working

[borsali.no]

Hi

I create fonts with fontforge,

at the testing stage,

why for all affinity kerning family doesn't work,

for testing at adobe, office, inkscape, everything is fine

is this a bug? or just need advanced settings

[Pšenda]

Click between two characters in your text? 

https://affinity.help/publisher/English.lproj/pages/Text/trackingKerning.html

[walt.farrell]

9 hours ago, borsali.no said:

why for all affinity kerning family doesn't work,

Welcome to the Serif Affinity forums.

Do you mean that the kerning pair data you have set up in the font you've created is not working? If so, can you share that font with us, or a subset of it, so we can examine it and try ourselves?

[borsali.no]

28 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

Selamat datang di forum Serif Affinity.

Apakah maksud Anda bahwa data pasangan kerning yang telah Anda setel di font yang Anda buat tidak berfungsi? Jika demikian, dapatkah Anda membagikan font itu dengan kami, atau sebagian darinya, sehingga kami dapat memeriksanya dan mencobanya sendiri?

I have tested, the results are as follows

for .ttf files (truetype), there is no problem

for the .otf file (opentype), the kerning I set doesn't work

Salonica.rar

[walt.farrell]

4 hours ago, borsali.no said:

for the .otf file (opentype), the kerning I set doesn't work

Thanks for the font file.

Can you be more specific about something that doesn't work? From a quick test, the kerning in the .otf version of that font seems to be working for me, so having a specific thing to look at would help.

Edit: I may see what you mean, but would like more feedback. One test I did was with the character pair cj, for example, which according to my font design program you have specified to look like this:

and which looks like this in Designer:

Is that gap what you're referring to?

Edit 2: I'm guessing that kind of thing is what you're referring to, as the other font file you provided looks like this in Designer:

Edit 3: So, to clarify, the OpenType TT (.ttf) version kerns differently (correctly?) than the OpenType CFF (.otf) version.

 

[borsali.no]

6 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

Terima kasih untuk file fontnya.

Bisakah Anda lebih spesifik tentang sesuatu yang tidak berhasil? Dari pengujian cepat, kerning dalam versi .otf dari font tersebut tampaknya berfungsi untuk saya, jadi memiliki hal tertentu untuk dilihat akan membantu.

Sunting: Saya mungkin mengerti maksud Anda, tapi ingin lebih banyak umpan balik. Salah satu tes yang saya lakukan adalah dengan pasangan karakter cj, misalnya, yang menurut program desain font saya, Anda telah menentukan agar terlihat seperti ini:

dan yang terlihat seperti ini di Designer:

Apakah celah itu yang Anda maksud?

Sunting 2: Saya menduga hal semacam itu yang Anda maksud, karena file font lain yang Anda berikan terlihat seperti ini di Designer:

Sunting 3: Jadi, untuk memperjelas, versi OpenType TT (.ttf) berbeda kerns (benar?) Dari versi OpenType CFF (.otf).

 

Yes, exactly

I have tested the .otf file in several software

only in the whole affinity family (photo, publisher, designer) has a problem

is this a bug or are there more specific settings?

Thank you so much for your help

[walt.farrell]

On 1/24/2021 at 6:49 PM, borsali.no said:

is this a bug or are there more specific settings?

There are no more settings in the Affinity applications that would account for this, that I know of.

It feels like a bug to me, but I am still a novice at analyzing fonts, so I cannot be certain that your font is constructed properly. There are others here in the forum with much more expertise in font analysis than I have (such as @LibreTraining), or with your font file (thanks, again) someone from Serif may be able to determine what is happening.

[kenmcd]

@borsali.no

I took a look at the fonts. There are a few issues.

First, the two fonts do not have the same glyphs, which is a bit odd.
You should have one source file and output the different formats.
But I did not see any glaring differences which would explain the issue.

Second, yes, I can see the kerning issue with the OTF font when testing in APub.
And I think this is due to the odd way the kerning is done is confusing APub, or Designer.
Why it only affects the OTF file I do not know.

Typically simple smaller fonts will have a number of kerning classes, and all of those are in one subtable.
Larger fonts may have many kerning classes (80 or more in a larger font with 5-6 times more glyphs than yours),
and then really large fonts may have multiple sub-tables to help organize things even more.

You have zero classes, and 48 sub-tables.
Never seen that before.
Technically it should probably work, but it is a bit odd, and obviously the Affinity apps don't like it.

FontCreator shows 1,197 kerning pairs; FontLab shows 1,160.
This leads me to believe there may be some conflicting duplicates in there.
I don't even know how to check this.
All the tools are for managing kerning classes, not a bunch of sub-tables.

Finally, and this is more font design best practices, kerning should not be used to compensate for bad spacing.
If everything has to be kerned, something is wrong with the basic character widths.
Typically with monoline handwriting fonts all, or most, of the lowercase fits together in any order with no kerning at all.

Laura Worthington (an expert designer of script fonts) has a video on YouTube on how to create script fonts that fit properly.
The sound is kinda bad, but she is master font developer who is definitely one to listen to and to emulate.
Recommend you watch it, and apply the concepts that she is teaching.

Conclusion: ADesigner has a problem with the kerning code.
Yes, it should probably work, but it is not likely this will get developer attention because it is such an odd case.
Plus, you should fix the spacing, and use kerning classes, and the issue will probably go away.

[ves2]

I have a similar problem with old original Mac Postscript Type1 fonts. The problem: glyph pairs like "To" lose automatic kerning in AP. These font metrics are usually stored in the Mac Font Suitcase file "FFIL" and not in the printer fonts "LWFN". It seems that AP ignores these font metrics. If this were so - an embarrassing programming error for a publishing tool!
Attached is a screenshot. Above the Postscript Type1 fonts and below the same as OpenTyp Font.

[Old Bruce]

5 minutes ago, ves2 said:

I have a similar problem with old original Mac Postscript Type1 fonts. The problem: glyph pairs like "To" lose automatic kerning in AP. These font metrics are usually stored in the Mac Font Suitcase file "FFIL" and not in the printer fonts "LWFN". It seems that AP ignores these font metrics. If this were so - an embarrassing programming error for a publishing tool!

Type one Postscript fonts are basically no longer supported by modern software, Adobe will abandon them in 2023

https://helpx.adobe.com/fonts/kb/postscript-type-1-fonts-end-of-support.html

[ves2]

I would like to have this statement directly from the Serif developers. 
I still have a large Type1 font library for print and upgrading to Opentyp would cost many times more than a publishing program.
When Adobe dupes its customers, Serif doesn't have to follow suit. It is also not to understand that Typ1 is half supported.

[loukash]

2 hours ago, ves2 said:

old original Mac Postscript Type1 fonts. The problem: glyph pairs like "To" lose automatic kerning in AP. These font metrics are usually stored in the Mac Font Suitcase file "FFIL" and not in the printer fonts "LWFN". It seems that AP ignores these font metrics.

Thanks for pointing that out.

2 hours ago, Old Bruce said:

Type one Postscript fonts are basically no longer supported by modern software

Already on MacOS El Capitan – i.e. since 5 years now – they will only be visible if located inside user Home folder. Which was apparently deliberate Apple decision "by design" in order to phase them out, too. Forgot the details, read it somewhere while wondering why my Type 1 fonts from /Users/Shared folder don't appear anywhere…

1 hour ago, ves2 said:

I still have a large Type1 font library for print and upgrading to Opentyp would cost many times more than a publishing program.

fontlab.com/font-converter/transtype
If the end user license of the respective font allows conversion, of course.
(I don't have TransType, but I have their TypeTool which was a nice lightweight font editor that can also convert Type 1 fonts – but it's 32-bit and won't work on anything higher than Mojave.)

[lacerto]

(...)

[ves2]

Thank you for your detailed answer.
The "No Kerning" problem certainly exists with all Type1 fonts in Mac OS. I use Mojave and the fonts are in the user folder.
The behaviour in AP on Windows doesn't seem to be correct either, as your example with the AV and VA pairs shows. With Fontexproler you can see the kerning of the pairs. These are identical with -95 units, see screenshots.
I share your assessment of the product philosophy of the Affinity apps and would welcome it for the older generation of users and switchers if better Type 1 support were realised.

[loukash]

ITC Korinna v1.004 that came with Illustrator 10 opened in TypeTool:

Correct kerning on El Capitan in:

• InDesign CS5.5
• Illustrator CS5
• QuarkXPress 2015
• Pages 4.3 (from iWork '09)

No kerning in:

• APu
• TextEdit & any app that uses the NSText framework:

No Type 1 fonts show up in:

• LibreOffice

Then we have VectorStyler beta which will display Korinna in the font menu but text disappears when selected. That aside, VectorStyler ignores that many fonts in my /Library/Fonts are disabled and shows them in the Font menus nonetheless, but text then remains blank. Still a long way for VectorStyler to go to be of any reliable use…

[lacerto]

(...)

[loukash]

20 minutes ago, Lagarto said:

Many people have also invested a lot in PS fonts and therefore undestandably like to continue using them

As I already noted, technically it's really easy to convert them to OTF. Even in TypeTool – which is actually an editor – it's a matter of a few clicks if you go by the user manual. Unless you want to update or add some missing glyphs (mmm… Czech diacritics, yum!) which takes some time.

By the way, FontLab have an extensive how-to on how to run TypeTool – or any other 32-bit apps for that matter – beyond Mojave: blog.fontlab.com/fontlab/fontlab-studio-5/fls5-fog5-tt3-macos-catalina

[lacerto]

(...)

[loukash]

2 hours ago, Lagarto said:

can you easily test pre-Mojave and/or Mojave and some earlier Adobe app behavior so that we could determine if there is some definite point when kerning support for Type 1 has ceased on macOS? 

My Adobe CS5 is on El Capitan only.
I still have a bootable USB stick with a clone of my old drive upgraded to Sierra, incl. CS5 and all my fonts installed. I could check that out but it will unlikely be any better than on El Capitan.

Never used Mavericks or Yosemite.
I don't remember having had serious problems with Type 1 on Mountain Lion. I actually used Affinity Photo/Designer on Mountain Lion a few years ago sometimes, but not for typography. The latest Affinity versions from Apple App Store still run on Mountain Lion, by the way. Serif Store versions require Mavericks.

My Sierra up to Catalina partitions don't have any 3rd party fonts installed yet: I'm still undecided what to use as a font manager on Catalina. FontExplorer 4 (which is nowadays free under certain conditions!) crashes on Catalina. Apple's Font Book still sucks. The affordable rest of the bunch pales in comparision to FontExplorer. Sigh.

[ves2]

3 hours ago, Lagarto said:

But on macOS this really seems to be more complex. I just tested ITC Korinna Type 1 on Mojave and Big Sur, and Adobe Photoshop 2021 does not show any metrics based kerning for the font, while QuarkXPress does. It seems Quark either applies some kind of autokerning of its own for the font, or then reads information that other apps (e.g. Adobe apps and Pages) do not -- perhaps this is intentional, in effort to fade away Type 1 and force people to move to OpenType. @loukash -- can you easily test pre-Mojave and/or Mojave and some earlier Adobe app behavior so that we could determine if there is some definite point when kerning support for Type 1 has ceased on macOS? 

Under Mac OS Mojave with Adobe CS6, PS Type1 kerning still works perfectly. I have avoided later versions because of the subscription. With QuarkXpress it works perfectly up to the current version 2020. 
As already described by Old Bruce Adobe wants to discontinue support from 2021 to 2023.

[lacerto]

(...)

[ves2]

The key for me is whether Serif is willing to address this problem. Otherwise, the APu is not an option for me. I would like an answer from the developers. Is it possible to contact them directly?

[loukash]

1 hour ago, Lagarto said:

Pages does not support autokerning of Type 1, either, but I am not sure if it has ever supported it.

23 hours ago, loukash said:

Correct kerning on El Capitan in:

• […]
• Pages 4.3 (from iWork '09)

Haven't installed any newer version on El Capitan because it … hm, nevermind.

[Aleksey Popovtsev]

Hi Everyone!
I had such problem with kerning. My kerning didn't work in Affinity but worked everywhere. I have tried a lot of things. But I found answer. 
I work with Glyphs app for font develop, and it put "kern" features in opentype features code. This features contain "contextual kerning" it works for three or more symbol. For example french situation "L'A". I just blocked this features and my kerning worked properly then.
Maybe it will help for someone!

[kenmcd]

1 hour ago, Aleksey Popovtsev said:

Hi Everyone!
I had such problem with kerning. My kerning didn't work in Affinity but worked everywhere. I have tried a lot of things. But I found answer. 
I work with Glyphs app for font develop, and it put "kern" features in opentype features code. This features contain "contextual kerning" it works for three or more symbol. For example french situation "L'A". I just blocked this features and my kerning worked properly then.
Maybe it will help for someone!

Kinda common. That should work.

Is your first line correct?