Andre Poenitz writes:
> On Mon, Jan 23, 2006 at 08:55:27PM +0100, Kevin Pfeiffer wrote:
> > Andre Poenitz writes:
> > > I'd guess it's almost impossible to get kerning right in all
> > > circumstances.
> > There can't be too many more than about 65K possible combinations I
> > would think -- apologies in advance if my math is wrong.
>
> Like UCS4 squared? Makes 2^64 at max. Ok. A few Klingon/Prehistoric
> Chinese combination could probably disregarded.

I don't see how you arrive at that. If I assume perhaps twenty or so 
ranges of 256 chars. for a very large font family (including greek 
letters, punctuation and more -- and I assume that this would cover CM, 
Knuth's font and the one I am using) I come up with roughly 5K 
characters. And it seems to me that the kerning pairs would be 5K to 
the power of 2 (not 2 to the power of 5K) -- though I admit that as a 
non-mathematician I only arrived at this by putting five letters on a 
page and adding up the possible pairs (AA, AB, AC, AD, AE, BA, BB, 
etc.); this gave me 25, not 32.

Anyway, one can assume (I would have thought) that Knuth would have 
worked in an optimal manner and therefore paid particular attention to 
the most common possible combinations (such as the basic lower- and 
uppercase letters and punctuation). I can only assume that there was a 
good reason that such pairs as "-W" kern as they do...

-Kevin

-- 
Kevin Pfeiffer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Tiros-Translations

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