Funnily enough the example given of good “L” and “T” kerning in the word SALTY is badly kerned, the letters are kerned too close to each other. The classic trick is to look at 3-letter groups at a time, one word at a time.
It’s a deliberate design decision because of the stripes:
> The pattern of vertical stripes means that kerns can only be a multiple of the stripe repeat (not quite true, and i have sketched out more general versions of this, but it is true for this font).
This has a lot to do with framing in photography, architecture, and all these other things where "design" is involved that humans perceive as pleasing. It also means that not everyone has a knack for that. In return, chances are good that there are ways to actually "calculate" it. One well known example: The golden ratio that shows up in many designs, architecture, framing etc.
The complexity comes from needlessly combining two separate things into one: a simple repeating background pattern and a typeface. It's a "serving suggestion" when really all that's needed is the corn flakes.
Yes, but if you are really picky you will want your background pattern to align nicely with your typeface. Sure, you can carefully try to ensure that each character is a multiple of some fixed unit and set your stripe size based on that. Then make sure that the start padding is correct. But every step of the way any differences in the text renderer and things like accessibility settings overriding font sizes will be working against you. If you want to use this on a website or any other medium that doesn't have a very strict and consistent rendering pipeline I can't think of a better way to do it than a font like this.
Ha the font looks great; but this seems to be pushing the boundaries what fonts themselves were designed to support, definitely "hard mode". What is the intended use case?
Classically, you'd do things like replace f+i with an fi glyph, or f+f+i into an ffi. Though I'm surprised that it can be used to split one glyph into multiple glyphs, then transform those glyphs again.
I can't help but point out that as someone who went to college for journalism and graphic design in the early 90s, and had to lay out galleys using strips of words and a razor blade, let me assure this isn't the hard way. Correcting a missing apostrophe or manually adding a hyphen while not throwing off an entire line requires both an eye for kerning and a steady hand.
I've had the same idea for Finnish, where all-uppercase text has some really ghastly kerning issues, like YT and VY and KY and (gack!) LJ. I hope to see a font RSN.
Fonts should probably not do this. This would be better served as the font being what's in negative, and then the backdrop behind it being an unrelated graphical element, perhaps accomplished with css.
I did a round of printing work two years ago which got me to notice (1) very few printed posters where people use serifed display fonts and (2) awful kerning by default with Microsoft and Adobe tools. When I did desktop publishing in the early 90s and early 00s I never noticed that kerning was so bad and wonder if I had bad taste back then or if it really got worse, like we can blame a patent troll for bad kerning -- I look at old books and see the r almost making love to the s next to it and think how much better it can be.
I spent most of the 1990s and early 2000s working for a typesetting company whose work was college textbooks and monographs for academic presses. We applied modified kern tables to every single typeface we acquired. The tables from the font vendors were inadequate in various ways.
Back then, computers didn't really do kerning as well as they do now, and desktop publishing wasn't as common or affordable. Today, publishing tools are so easy to use, and the default kerning is usually good enough that most people won't notice a problem, or if they do, they often don't know it can be fixed.
> When I did desktop publishing in the early 90s and early 00s I never noticed that kerning was so bad and wonder if I had bad taste back then or if it really got worse, like we can blame a patent troll for bad kerning ….
My suspicion is that there's always been bad kerning in most computer-generated text. Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1015/
I love bad kerning more than most, but a lot of those feel like someone just put a space in the wrong place.
That’s a shame, I like my kerning to sit in that sweet spot where people don’t notice it but once you point it out it gives them an unsettling feeling wherever they see it.
> I like my kerning to sit in that sweet spot where people don’t notice it but once you point it out it gives them an unsettling feeling wherever they see it.
Isn’t kerning something that would be amenable to be approximately solved by machine learning? I.e. for a “good enough” default kerning? (Ignoring the extra difficulty from the stripes in TFA.)
Human perception is highly non-linear and largely based on the concepts stored in the brain. Trying to manually approximate that with math is bound to fail once you approach certain fidelity threshold. If you look at the recent color science and spatial perception research, it becomes obvious that it makes total sense to mass profile the perception and throw ML at it. A lot of researchers are still in denial about this, though.
There have been lots of attempts to automate kerning for decades. Most people seem to agree that they're still inadequate and that manual adjustments produce the best results.
Agree with sibling comments. There's something very slippery and tricky going on with "perceptual area," it's not simple geometry. This is actually an area where I think machine learning has something to offer.
Mrs. Scyzoryk is a typographer, confirms that it’s not just math, but can’t imagine using ML for what is an integral part of developing an „eye” and going through the process.
In my e-reader I changed the font to Roboto Mono and completely forgot it was monospace. It's not like reading feels any less efficient. Idk might even feel more efficient or comfy somehow.
Maybe there's an advantage to having each successive character appear perfectly rhythmically across the page.
What I want are two or even three shades for consecutive lines, to make it easier to transition from the end of the current line to the beginning of the next.
Kerning lets letters be spaced more uniformly, which is easier to read for most of us.
It also allows letters to crowd each other like friends in a wacky group photo, a tree overhanging a sidewalk, or a cat's tail doing its weird contortions. Fonts are fun.
It’s worth the trouble I think, but there are options if you’d rather not support it.
it's one of many little things that add up to "oh your poster looks much nicer than the others" - but they can't put their finger on what exactly makes it nice.
It’s not factorial, that’d be ludicrous… Rather it’s (n * (n+1))/2, which is similar to factorial but using addition instead of multiplication.(52+51+…+1) So a lot, lot smaller.
> The pattern of vertical stripes means that kerns can only be a multiple of the stripe repeat (not quite true, and i have sketched out more general versions of this, but it is true for this font).
https://www.ironicsans.com/2008/02/idea_a_new_typography_ter...
https://fuckyeahkeming.com
https://www.reddit.com/r/keming/
Get off my lawn.
The Pharaoh was not amused, I'll tell you that much.
My suspicion is that there's always been bad kerning in most computer-generated text. Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1015/
That’s a shame, I like my kerning to sit in that sweet spot where people don’t notice it but once you point it out it gives them an unsettling feeling wherever they see it.
I’d love to see some examples of this.
What I want are two or even three shades for consecutive lines, to make it easier to transition from the end of the current line to the beginning of the next.
It also allows letters to crowd each other like friends in a wacky group photo, a tree overhanging a sidewalk, or a cat's tail doing its weird contortions. Fonts are fun.
It’s worth the trouble I think, but there are options if you’d rather not support it.