I'm working on a Latin-based font that's got a large number of kerning pairs already defined and I'm trying to pare this list of pairs down to the bare minimum. There seem to be many pairs which are unlikely ever to be used. These pairs all involve a lowercase on the left with an uppercase on the right.
My intuition is to delete all such pairs but since I am not a linguist I thought I'd better check first. Does anyone know of a Latin-based language in which it is possible to have a lowercase immediately followed by an uppercase in the SAME word?
This is not uncommon in some of the Bantu languages; I can't remember which ones, but at least one major regional language in southern Africa.
You should be aware that there are lots of applications that gag on large numbers of kerning pairs. Thomas Phinney in the type group at Adobe advised us that 3,000 standard kern pairs is about the maximum one can expect to work in all apps. Some applications will fail to support the rull range of kerning pairs if there are too many; some applications will not support any kerning if there are too many pairs; and some older applications may even crash.
In OpenType fonts, using GPOS instead of kern table kerning, you can employ class-based kerning, which can be very handy for large fonts. Some systems will decompile GPOS kerning to standard kerning on the fly, which may result in subsetting of kerning (Adobe Type Manager and the CFF rasteriser in Windows does this for PS-flavour OT fonts, subsetting to Windows CP 1252 support). The subsetting is necessary because the fully decompiled class-based kerning for a font can easily overload many applications (the class-based kerning in Adobe's Minion Pro decompiles to approx. 70,000 pairs). Adobe's latest applications, e.g. InDesign, make direct use of GPOS kerning, so can access all the kerning in a font. Hopefully more applications and systems will soon follow suit. Windows supports GPOS kerning for complex scripts via Uniscribe, but not yet for Latin or other 'simple' scripts.
Finally, bear in mind that an excessive number of kerning pairs may indicate that your font has fundamental spacing problems. It is often possible to reduce the number of kerning pairs by revising the sidebearings to produce a better pre-kern fit.
John Hudson
Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com Vancouver, BC [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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