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Re: calculating kerning pairs

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In article <jl8d0lFdt3qU1@mid.individual.net>, taviso@gmail.com says...

> Hello, I naively assumed that when I did setfont (foo) show that the
> kerning pairs in the font tables would influence spacing.

PostScript type 1 fonts don't have kerning information in the font.

 
> I understand now that it does not. You're supposed to use kshow and
> apply the character spacing yourself.
> 
> Fair enough, but then how do I get the "base" kerning for a character
> pair from within postscript, or do you have to parse the afm files
> manually?

You have to parse the AFM files (or kern tables in a TrueType font) 
manually.

 
> I understand that I can specify any kerning I want and that's a good
> thing, but wouldn't you usually want that to be a multiplier applied to
> the font's "base" kerning pairs?

I can't pretend to know the reasoning behind the original design, but I 
would suggest that kerning is regarded as being like all other spacing 
control (widow/orphan/rivers etc) to be managed by the layout 
application.

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calculating kerning pairs Tavis Ormandy <taviso@gmail.com> - 2022-08-06 23:49 +0000
  Re: calculating kerning pairs ken <ken@spamcop.net> - 2022-08-08 08:00 +0100

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