Improve letters dcaron, tcaron, lcaron and Lcaron

[pavel-farar]

The letters ď and ť are used in the Czech language. All four letters are used in the Slovak language.

The ideal for words with the letters ď, ť, ľ and Ľ is:

1. The word containing one of these letters should be compact, the possition of the following letter should be the same as if the same letter without the accent were used. For example the spacing in the word loďka should be the same as in lodka.

2. The accent should not collide with the following letter.

3. It should be clear that the accents belongs to the correct (left) letter and not the following one.

It is often difficult to do all that at the same time and some trade-off must be made.

Currently, there is much bigger space in the Gentium fonts after a letter like ď than after the respective letter without an accent. It would be great if you could consider improving this in the next release of the fonts. There is no rush for you, of course.

One way of improving this is adding some kerning pairs. This is the way, how it is done in the Type 1 version of the fonts that you kindly permitted to create for the typesetting system TeX. However, there are better ways (smaller advance width and the shape and position of the accent).

If you would like to look at these kerning pairs (and/or the remaining kerning pairs added to the Type 1 fonts for TeX) or something else, just let me know and I will provide it in a way that will be best for you.

Most fonts are bad when it concerns these letters. Here are some samples of how this should look.

First, fonts from Adobe:

https://fonts.adobe.com/fonts/garamond-premier

Garamond Premier Pro Regular

Garamond Premier Pro Bold

https://fonts.adobe.com/fonts/minion

Minion Pro Regular

Minion Pro Bold

Now, fonts by Czech type designer František Štorm and his StormType foundry:

https://www.stormtype.com/families/baskerville-original

Baskerville 10 Pro

Baskerville 10 Pro Bold

https://www.stormtype.com/families/hercules

Hercules

Hercules Bold

You can see two basic shapes of the accent.

The most common trade-off is between not increasing the distance between letters and collision of the accent and the following letter.

Some discussion about this topic can be found here:

https://typedrawers.com/discussion/4429/lcaron-and-dcaron

I hope that it is sufficient to get the first idea of the issue.

[jvgaultney]

Thanks for the suggestions. There has been a significant shift in preferred style (and spacing) for this letter over the last 20 years since Gentium was originally designed. At that time I received good help and positive feedback from Czech designers who were very happy with the current design. If I were designing it today I would make it much more vertical and tucked in closer to the letter.

Since the current design has been established for so many years, and has many fans, we're not likely to change it a lot. However we are (finally) looking at adding many more kerning sequences to the fonts for the next major release and will try to improve the spacing, esp. with lowercase letters without ascenders.

[pavel-farar]

Kerning pairs will definitely improve the readability of the words with these letters.

You might also consider making the advance width of ď and ľ smaller. This would have another advantage: the right margin of the text would look better if one of these letters were at the end of the line. It is similar to hanging punctuation, but it doesn't have to be an all or nothing case.

Thanks again for your nice fonts.

[jvgaultney]

Thanks