Path: csiph.com!weretis.net!feeder6.news.weretis.net!news.misty.com!border-2.nntp.ord.giganews.com!border2.nntp.dca1.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!buffer2.nntp.dca1.giganews.com!nntp.brightview.co.uk!news.brightview.co.uk.POSTED!not-for-mail NNTP-Posting-Date: Mon, 08 Aug 2022 02:00:45 -0500 From: ken Newsgroups: comp.lang.postscript Subject: Re: calculating kerning pairs Date: Mon, 8 Aug 2022 08:00:43 +0100 Message-ID: References: Reply-To: ken@spamcop.net MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit User-Agent: MicroPlanet-Gravity/3.0.4 X-Antivirus: Avast (VPS 220806-4, 6/8/2022), Outbound message X-Antivirus-Status: Clean Lines: 28 X-Usenet-Provider: http://www.giganews.com X-Trace: sv3-q3MFFCwLttGRb7M4e9wSP1tiR+SGe/GPPY+ilRTky9GBVA7SJ98jJj0D+g9LU1tXv7bXzHrr7zeOC0y!l21pyWWNf8kHFFtuu7D0SIyMy8D+EpNTtSZuU0v6+esLmG97Oij4sdPN7J+naEu5KkXTeJ5qFwAN!K8ioV/ZeOY1KKg== X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Please be sure to forward a copy of ALL headers X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Otherwise we will be unable to process your complaint properly X-Postfilter: 1.3.40 X-Original-Bytes: 2135 Xref: csiph.com comp.lang.postscript:3792 In article , 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.