Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcvax!ukc!acorn!john
From: john@acorn.co.uk (John Bowler)
Newsgroups: comp.fonts
Subject: Re: How flexible are the Macintosh outline fonts?
Summary: Acorn DTP does not support automatic kerning
Message-ID: <812@acorn.co.uk>
Date: 13 Jul 89 11:33:18 GMT
References: <1989Jul12.111024.10324@sics.se>
Organization: Acorn Computers Limited, Cambridge, UK
Lines: 26

In article <1989Jul12.111024.10324@sics.se>, dan@sics.se (Dan Sahlin) writes:
> 
> - Acorn DTP uses knowledge about the form of the letters to make the
> kerning "perfect" and automatic. For instance, the pair "AV" can kern
> very much due to the shape of the letters, whereas "VV" cannot kern much
> at all.  This method for kerning should also be possible for the outline
> fonts for the Mac as the shape is available.
> 
Unfortunately this is not the case - currently our font format has space
for character pair kerning information, but this is not used.  Manual
kerning is certainly possible, but automatic kerning seems too much to
hope for at present.  For example how close should the letter pair OO
be placed?  If kerning is done on the basis of character shape the two
letters would almost certainly be placed too far apart.  Perhaps some
form of weighted average using a series of character widths entered by
the font designer would give reasonable results (ie better than no kerning).
The idea is certainly interesting.

The point about the Acorn DTP font format (which may have given rise to
the above confusion) is that the hints combined with the support for 
anti-aliased fonts within the operating system allow the production of
quite reasonable screen fonts at small point sizes.  Of course, the other
advantage is that the software is available now :-) (In Europe)

John Bowler, Acorn Computers Ltd
[The opinions are my own - not necessarily Acorn's]