Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!microsoft!tonyw
From: tonyw@microsoft.UUCP (Tony WILLIAMS)
Newsgroups: comp.fonts
Subject: Re: Types of kerning
Message-ID: <57610@microsoft.UUCP>
Date: 21 Sep 90 02:33:10 GMT
References: <38743@shemp.CS.UCLA.EDU> <4cac478e.20b6d@apollo.HP.COM> <1990Sep7.204316.26956@jarvis.csri.toronto.edu> <142132@sun.Eng.Sun.COM>
Reply-To: tonyw@microsoft.UUCP (Tony WILLIAMS)
Organization: Microsoft Corp., Redmond WA
Lines: 31

In article <142132@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> tut@cairo.Sun.COM (Bill "Bill" Tuthill) writes:
>avi@dgp.toronto.edu (Avi Naiman) writes:
  [omitted]

>> Optical Spacing.  This isn't so much a 'kerning' technique as an overall
>> character spacing technique developed by David Kindersley, a typographer,
>> together with Neil Wiseman, a computer scientist.
>
>Was this work done in order to earn a graduate degree?  Sounds like it.
>Again, this just seems like another complicated algorithm for pair kerning.

Well, I waited to see if the original article would appear, but maybe
I just missed it.

I don't know why you make your remark about earning a graduate degree.
That seems to carry connotations of work that has theoretical interest
but no practical value, and I see nothing to imply those.  Some great
work comes out of collaborations between good people of different
disciplines.

In the case in point, optical spacing is based on the optical characteristics
of the letter shapes, and has the advantage that character positioning can
be calculated without referring to tables indexed by pairs of characters.
The spacing is calculated from values stored for each character.

The technique can also automatically produce the appearance of ligatures,
with no special code.  This works since character shapes can be placed
so as to overlap, which is easy with laser beams and ink, but hard with
metal type.

Tony.