Roman fl too close

[katef]

I realise the Roman face is designed intentionally such that the usual f- ligatures should not be neccessary, but this looks too close for comfort, to me:

[skosch]

Blown up this way, it sure looks precariously close. Feel free to create a ligature instead or to try adding a kerning pair, but I'm reluctant to change the spacing by much, and here's why:

The metrics were done by Igino Marini and his iKern scripts (look it up – cool stuff!), and designed to make for an even overall colour. At text sizes, this translates mostly to evenly/rhythmically spaced vertical stems because our adult human spatial-frequency perceptrons work best at around 1 to 10 cycles per degree of visual angle, which is just the range that text-sized letter stem distances fall into (no coincidence there!).

At larger optical sizes (read: when you're staring at Fontforge's metrics window), those same 5-cyc/deg neural networks will instead light up on close encounters between outlines. Many professional type designers will stand a few meters away from their screen when judging text font metrics – shrink the subtended visual angle, and you won't notice the details; but when you're staring right at a blown-up letter pair you can't help but look at details instead of overall colour. Mind you, this is hard-wired stuff, not a matter of how good your eyes are. Type families that come with optical sizes, like some of the pricey Adobe ones, include lovely "Display" headline fonts with size-appropriate metrics, but Crimson is a text font.

In other words, I believe that if you intend to write "fly" at such a large size, using a text font, you should manually track out fl and pull in ly.

If that sounds utterly obvious or like obnoxious crackpottery, there are a whole bunch of neat experiments on this stuff, like Majaj et al. '02 or Chung et al. '02, and a good summary here. I'm also a particular fan of Dennis Pelli's papers. You may have seen https://github.com/skosch/fittingroom ... clearly I have a bit of an obsession with this kind of thing :)

Then again, f and l being a bit further apart probably won't hurt nobody. Give it a shot if you like.

[skosch]

(To be clear, when I say "Crimson is a text font", that's not me issuing some arbitrary self-important edict on font usage, but simply a function of the font's proportions, serif thickness, etc.)

[katef]

No no, that doesn't sound obnoxious at all. I understand it's a text font! And I agree that the horizontal spacing is correct for the body of the glyphs here; I wouldn't want to make them further apart, because the verticals are in exactly the right places.

My complaint is only that they almost touch at the top, and that seems clumsy to me. I'm specifically thinking about at text sizes; 12pt or so.

I wasn't neccessarily proposing a solution here, just pointing out an aspect which seems to jar visually. In fact, I wonder, if I did try a ligature, perhaps it could cut away the serif of the l to give a little gap, rather than joining them? Then the f's blob would stay where it is.

[skosch]

That might work, if you can make it obvious that the l is accommodating the f and not just a defective, stunted version of itself. Otherwise, a proper ligature may be in order. A third option may be to actually extend the l's serif to simply remove the small gap between the letters. Up to you!

[katef]

I think extending the serif would work in the least invasive manner. Just so that it looks intentional.