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.
gundmc 3 hours ago [-]
I thought so too, but now if I look it seems as if every letter is just under two stripes with from its neighbor?
jedberg 4 hours ago [-]
I literally read this headline as "keming the hard way" and thought it was the most clever title ever.
Oh I know. I’ve been thinking about keming for 30+ years. :)
badlibrarian 2 hours ago [-]
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.
kevincox 45 minutes ago [-]
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.
jasonthorsness 5 hours ago [-]
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?
LegionMammal978 4 hours ago [-]
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.
3 hours ago [-]
euroderf 3 hours ago [-]
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.
russellbeattie 3 hours ago [-]
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.
Get off my lawn.
drpossum 5 hours ago [-]
keming
PaulHoule 4 hours ago [-]
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.
f30e3dfed1c9 3 hours ago [-]
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.
thesuitonym 3 hours ago [-]
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.
JadeNB 4 hours ago [-]
> 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.
keming 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.
user3939382 3 hours ago [-]
Kerning the hard way would be to hardcode the “numberOfChars factorial/!” number of custom kerning distances.
oniony 3 hours ago [-]
Would it have been possible to fix this by instead swapping out the LT pair with a ligature?
3 hours ago [-]
shove 55 minutes ago [-]
I could have sworn that was where this was going in the first place
whatnow37373 4 hours ago [-]
I don’t see how the benefits of kerning, if any, outweigh the enormous costs.
Muromec 4 hours ago [-]
It looks nice. When everyrhing consistently looks nice, thise small things accumulate into one apple.
dsp_person 2 hours ago [-]
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.
MrMcCall 4 minutes ago [-]
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.
keming 2 hours ago [-]
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.
exe34 3 hours ago [-]
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.
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.)
shove 56 minutes ago [-]
Since it’s an issue of equalizing the perceptual area in the negative space, there’s not really any reason to throw ML at it. Throw actual math at it.
https://www.ironicsans.com/2008/02/idea_a_new_typography_ter...
https://fuckyeahkeming.com
https://www.reddit.com/r/keming/
Get off my lawn.
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.