On 4/30/06, juraj sukop <juraj.sukop@...400...> wrote:
I would like to develop a tool for automatic kerning -- this should adjust the position of the letters in a text to correct the spacing irregularities, to ease the reading flow and to improve readability. This is also called optical kerning. To me, this is very helpful feature and I can imagine it could be of use for other open source software as well.
That's an interesting idea. Theoretically, each decent font has its own kerning pairs which were designed to work best for this font. But designers know very well that many fonts have no kerning pairs, or too few, or their pairs are outright weird. Personally, I never produce a text line in large size without some manual kerning.
On the other hand, such autokerning algorithms almost certainly have been researched, and maybe even implemented in some software. How aware are you of other similar efforts? In what ways your proposal is different or better? What aspects are you planning to take into account? For example, relative kerning should ideally change depending on the letterspacing (tracking). Also, diacritical marks have less "visual importance" than parts of the letter proper, and therefore should less affect kerning. Please share as much details as possible about the algorithm you have in mind.
-- bulia byak Inkscape. Draw Freely. http://www.inkscape.org