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Soft hyphen reduces letter spacing


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Title and attached image say all. Not just a render problem in Publisher, it looks the same in exported PDF.

soft-hyphens.jpg

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Windows 10 | i5-8500 CPU | Intel UHD 630 Graphics | 32 GB RAM | Latest Retail and Beta versions of complete Affinity range installed

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31 minutes ago, matisso said:

Does it persist if you change the font? Perhaps something has been overlooked in the font file itself.

Correct, not all fonts do have this problem, but some like: Corbel, Milo, Gabriola, Minion Pro, Myriad Pro, Source Sans Pro and Tahoma. These are the ones I found in my installed fonts.

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Windows 10 | i5-8500 CPU | Intel UHD 630 Graphics | 32 GB RAM | Latest Retail and Beta versions of complete Affinity range installed

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That’s pretty odd, I would assume this would happen in rather poorly designed fonts. Maybe the reason is somewhere else, or maybe the ones you mentioned do have bugs (not entirely impossible). However,  given how popular Minion, Tahoma and Myriad are, it’s hard to assume no one else noticed it before using software other than Affinity, so maybe there’s indeed a glitch…

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Too much work. :D I add a screenshot instead. Apart from a few fonts recently added like Milo, LCD and some more coming from CS6, the fonts were already installed on a brand new Windows 10 PC.

 

fonts.jpg

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Windows 10 | i5-8500 CPU | Intel UHD 630 Graphics | 32 GB RAM | Latest Retail and Beta versions of complete Affinity range installed

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I can reproduce it with Tahoma. I've not tried anything else. It happens because the font gives the soft hyphen character (U+00A0) the same glyph index as a normal hyphen (U+002D). It then kerns 't' with the normal hyphen's glyph index, effectively specifying that 't' kerns with soft hyphens. Arguably the font should not give soft hyphens any outline at all; we already have code that prevents them being drawn, but they were still being passed to the OpenType engine.

Looking into this I've found several other issues where kerning or other OpenType rules are affected by things they shouldn't be. For example, if you have an index mark between "AW" it won't kern. If between "fi" it won't form a ligature. A floating object pin will also make a difference.

I've logged this to be fixed in a future update. Thanks for reporting it.

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8 hours ago, Dave Harris said:

I can reproduce it with Tahoma. I've not tried anything else. It happens because the font gives the soft hyphen character (U+00A0) the same glyph index as a normal hyphen (U+002D).

That was part of the "common thread" I was seeing - the multi-mapped glyphs.

Also take a look at Source Sans Pro where it is not multi-mapped but the softhyphen is using the metrics from the hypheminus.
Per above this also causes this issue.
:)

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  • 2 months later...
  • Staff

We believe the issue "Soft hyphens affect kerning" has been fixed in 1.8.0 [Publisher beta is currently available if you care to check].

Patrick Connor
Serif Europe Ltd

"There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man. True nobility lies in being superior to your previous self."  W. L. Sheldon

 

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