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stewart tower
stewart tower
Known Participant
July 16, 2021
Question

Google Fonts and kerning

  • July 16, 2021
  • 1 reply
  • 670 views

Good day.

Our office (Mac and PC) has just made the switch to Google fonts for ALL of our work. I won't go into the long, sad story.

Open Sans Regular is the font for body copy. Using Metrics or Optical for Kerning does not seem to produce a good result. Neither do the Spacing or Scaling settings in Justification.

I've looked online and can't find any information on kerning for Google fonts. My feeling is kerning has not been a consideration so what we see is what we get.

Thoughts?

This topic has been closed for replies.

1 reply

BobLevine
Community Expert
BobLevineCommunity Expert
Community Expert
July 16, 2021
Well, we'd really need to see some screenshots at the very least along with better descriptions of the issues. I'm a fan of Google Fonts...for the web, but I don't get why you'd use them instead of Adobe's offerings.
stewart tower
stewart towerAuthor
Known Participant
July 26, 2021

I'm with you on using Adobe fonts but this was a corporate (government office) decision (meaning no one who knows better was asked).

We are now restricted to 3 google fonts (not a typeface with a variety of fonts but just a single font) which means we're going to have to get very creative with our software in order to make our work look as good as it should.

I've done some testing with InDesign's Justification settings and have managed to get a reasonable result but I still suspect that Google fonts have little, if any, metrics built into them.

I've set Justification settings to more extreme glyph scaling and have increased word spacing. The results aren't great but better. It's just not as polished as the Myriad Pro typeface we used previously.

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