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List:       freetype
Subject:    Re: [ft] Spacing/Kerning wrong on an OpenType (otf) font
From:       David Turner <dturner () nds ! com>
Date:       2006-04-25 7:44:41
Message-ID: 444DD369.8040906 () nds ! com
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George Williams a écrit :
> On Mon, 2006-04-24 at 17:21, Brian Gardner wrote:
> 
> > I'm trying to render an OpenType font we have purchased, "Helvetica Neue 
> > LT Pro 77 Bold Condensed", and the spacing isn't coming out right.  If 
> > you look at the spacing between the T and o in Tour it almost looks like 
> > Freetype is not performing any kerning.  I was hoping somebody could 
> > point me in the right direction.
> > 
> That's right. FreeType doesn't do kerning.
> 
> Kerning happens in the layer above freetype. Pango or some such.
> 
> 
To be more accurate, FreeType only provides the kerning data found in 
the internal
"kern" table within a TrueType font. However, many modern fonts do not 
provide
one. Instead, they provide OpenType layout table that implement, among a 
lot of
other things (e.g. ligatures, language-specific rendering, etc...), kerning.

And it's not possible to parse these tables properly at FreeType's 
level, this needs to
be done by a complete text layout library (e.g. Pango, Qt, ICU, wathever...)

What this means is that:

- ftview or ftstring cannot properly render kerned text with many modern 
fonts
- but the corresponding text should appear properly on a Unix desktop though

Hope this helps,

- David Turner
- The FreeType Project  (www.freetype.org)


> 
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> 
> 


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