A lot of Kerning inconsistencies

jpt / barlow

Barlow: a straight-sided sans-serif superfamily

https://tribby.com/fonts/barlow

SIL Open Font License 1.1

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A lot of Kerning inconsistencies #59

Open oomek opened 4 years ago

oomek commented 4 years ago

First of all I love this font, but it breaks my heart when I see that kerning tables are still half baked. At least it's what's FontLab is showing. Freetype2 library is making it even worse at small sizes, unfortunately.

forsgren commented 3 years ago

Was about to use this, but "2019" also ended up with poor kerning. Hoping this can be fixed.

jpt commented 3 years ago

Hi all, thanks for pointing this out. I think this broke because I brought in kerning from iKern but didn't bring in the classes? I will have to look. But honestly it's not a lot of masters, I should just re-kern the whole thing once I fix the other glyph-level issues.

oomek commented 3 years ago

Thanks for reply. That's what I did in FontLab ;) Manually re-kerned the missing pairs

jpt commented 2 years ago

this is fixed in https://github.com/jpt/barlow/tree/1.5 - I have rekerned the font. new font binaries coming soon.

jpt commented 2 years ago

binaries available here for testing: https://github.com/jpt/barlow/tree/1.5/fonts

forsgren commented 2 years ago

Seems to be improved now 👍

forsgren commented 2 years ago

There still seems to be some issues in the black italic variant. A few of the pairs I think it is a bit off between:

"SW"
"OY"
"SIG" (not quite sure about this one, to me it's the capital i that looks a bit "off center" between S and G)
"ON"
"CO"

jpt commented 2 years ago

Thanks for reporting - along with #74 I think there is a growing case to seriously look into #11. As it is, the kerning is probably not even receiving the correct offset as the slant is applied in the export process.

forsgren commented 2 years ago

I had a quick look among the upright characters as well. Based on the previous listing I find that at least these are quite noticeable there as well:

"SW"
"OY"

These are less so:

"ON"
"SIG"
"CO"

The slant being applied in the export can be one potential cause, but I would guess there still might be some issues among the upright versions.

This is in no way a comprehensive "inspection", just a few I noticed in a current personal design I'm working on :)

jpt commented 2 years ago

yeah, there are multiple issues with the way I set up Kern On (as based on previously set pairs) — this is all on the list :)