Is permanent custom font kerning possible?

[howie57]

I want to be able to adjust the kerning permanently for 2 characters in a family of Adobe fonts. Can I do this? (I constantly have to do this by hand and it would be great if the font could "learn" my desired kerning.)

It's Myriad Pro family. The C and lower-case R have not enough space on the right. (Cl looks like backwards D, 2 lower-case R's next to each other nearly connect, etc.). Even on the Adobe Type sample PDF of this font you can see that the C is always too close to the D compared with all the rest of the letter spacing. Is there a way to get access to a font's kerning tables? It would save me so much time if I could make this adjustment just once for all eternity.

[Dov Isaacs · Accepted solution]

The kerning tables for OpenType fonts are stored in the font itself. You cannot make a permanent change unless you modify the font itself. There are various font editing programs ranging from free to expensive, simple with few options to very complex with Swiss Army Knife features for modifying any aspect of a font.

And you must make sure that you follow the font vendor's license in terms of whether you legally permitted to modify the font and then whether you can distribute this modified font. In any case, to avoid conflicts with other instances of this font which might subsequently get installed on your system, you should save any modified font with a modified font name as well as file name.

                 - Dov

[howie57]

thank you!

[johnnynashville]

Dov, what you say is true, but I'm not sure that it answers the specific question. If I find that in using a particular font that I am making the same kerning adjustments every single time (perhaps because the font never had good metrics to begin with), then wouldn't it be great if we could ask InDesign or Illustrator to remember our kerning preferences for specific fonts and characters? It would save tons of time.

The difference is that you're not technically changing the metrics of the font, but InDesign or Illustrator is remembering that you prefer that "Y" and "o" a lot closer together, etc.

[Dov Isaacs]

I answered the specific question correctly, but the issue that you correctly allude to is that there is not any facility in Adobe applications for creation of either user-specific and/or document-specific pair kerning overrides for specific fonts.

You might want to submit such an idea as an enhancement request for InDesign and/or Illustrator.

             - Dov

[johnnynashville]

Good suggestion. Gonna do it right now.

[David W. Goodrich]

Peter Kahrels' Kerning javascript for InDesign can export custom kerning to an external file and apply it again.  AI's text engine differs from ID's, and I have no idea how hard it would be to write something similar for AI.

David

[SundayGladiator]

'..There are various font editing programs ranging from free to expensive, simple with few options to very complex with Swiss Army Knife features for modifying any aspect of a font..'

I keep running into this issue with the Avenir Next font. The kerning tables on several pairs I've noticed are just way off. Robotically I manually adjusting kerning in pairs like 'r' and 't' and 'A' and 'V' et al. 

Enough.

Two questions -

1. What brand of font editing software would you recommend for an intermediate to advanced Mac Adobe Illustrator user?

2. By changing the kerning tables in this software, would it create a whole new instance of the Avenir Next font? (eg 'Avenir Next Fixed Bold' ?!?! The answer I want to hear is no, because it would mean everyone else in my organization would have to have my adjusted font onto their machines in order to view my files properly. Hopefully 🙏, this is just a script on my machine that Illustrator would open and auto-kern-adjust the Avenir font to my specs.

Thank you, and thus far this post is the only canary in the coal mine of Google Search when it comes to modifying kerning tables. You'd think this would be a much bigger issue with type designers. 🤷‍:male_sign:

[Bobby Henderson]

Glyphs and FontLab Studio are the leading, commercially sold font editing applications. I think Glyphs is available only for the Mac platform. FontForge is a free, open source font editing application.

Importing existing fonts and making edits to them can potentially create a variety of new technical problems in the altered and re-generated font files. I've tried just using font conversion software (TransType 4) to fix font table naming issues in a large "super family" of fonts only to find the "repaired" fonts had damaged character sets, such as fraction sets that no longer worked properly. Fixing one problem seems to only create other problems.

If you alter the kerning tables in a font file, such as Avenir Next, and save the changes to that font file the changes are only going to be present in the file you altered. Another computer user with their own copy of Avenir Next will see text flow with the original kerning. You would have to give copies of the altered font files to anyone to view text on their computers with the altered kerning. That wouldn't be a very legal thing to do. Just about any commercially sold font has limits on the number of computers where it can be installed and more strict limits on providing copies of the font files to others.

I don't think there are any fonts that have perfect kerning, even ones with hundreds or thousands of kerning pairs included in the tables. I almost always have to make adjustments to lettering in design projects. Even when it's the same typeface the kerning adjustments may differ based on the nature of the project.

[SundayGladiator]

I appreciate the details in this response. Altering kerning tables would make my head spin, and no guarantees it would transfer cleanly from one machine to another.

Should have updated this post (I mentioned this in another..), but I've found using Illustrator's 'Optical' than 'Auto' shows significant improvements. Illustrator always defaults to 'Auto' - Don't know why - and would llike to change that default in the AI prefs.

This is enough for me to settle for Optical, then hand-kern certain typestyles on designs as needed.