[XeTeX] Kerning
Jonathan Kew
jonathan_kew at sil.org
Wed Jun 20 01:27:47 CEST 2007
On 19 Jun 2007, at 6:23 am, John Was wrote:
> Hello
Hello John,
> I wonder if there exists, or there are plans for, a facility to
> modify the kerns of a Unicode and/or outline font within XeTeX
> without specifically editing the font
It's a request that has come up a few times, in varying forms.
There's no current work in this area (unless someone is working on a
patch that I don't know about!), but it's something I would like to
get to eventually. The actual design of such a feature is still open
to suggestions...
> something like:
>
> \myfont = "Minion Pro"[:myfont.krn] at 11pt
>
> The file myfont.krn would be a list of user-defined kerns to be
> applied to \myfont only within the document
Yes, this sort of thing would be possible, in principle - though note
that kerns will have to be expressed in terms of glyphs, not
characters. (Consider a font with many swash variants of "T" - you
don't necessarily want the same kerns between each of these and
adjacent glyphs.)
> If this works in principle, it could be extended to include
> automatic invocation of ligatures,
This is somewhat less likely to happen, because of the added
complexity of making it interact properly with the existing layout
features in the font (e.g, GPOS kern features). Additional kern pairs
could be applied after the standard layout is complete, as a final
step. Glyph changes here, on the other hand, ought to interact with
the rest of the OpenType layout process - in ways that would require
some careful consideration.
> perhaps even from a different font
And this is *much* less likely to be implemented. At this point, it's
starting to sound like building a whole new version of the "virtual
font" infrastructure. I don't think that's a good way forward in the
modern world. Better to focus on creating (or stimulating the
creation of) fonts that do actually contain the character & glyph
repertoire and behavior you need.
JK
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