Hi,

Aewyn writes:

Is there any way to set letter's kerning in gimp?

If you are refering to letter spacing or tracking, here's the relevant bug report:

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=125483

Sven

Hi,

Aewyn writes:

but not really. (kerning means the different space needed between A - V, and V - V; it depends on the used font, but fonts sometimes (always) have erroneus kernings)

GIMP uses the kerning tables that come with the fonts. If they are incorrect, I'd say the fonts need fixing then. There's a free font editor (http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/) that you can use.

Sven

Hi,

Aewyn writes:

Editing fonts doesn't belong to a designer. I can't fix my 2000 fonts. Think, I get a work, start on it, meanwhile appears a font problem. There is no time and possibility to fix it.

Just a little hint: there can be a text file, from gimp can get the pair corrections by pairs. When I run into a bad pair, I just take a new entry to it. It is fast and simple, and at first it doesn't need any gui. (By default, there can be an empty file, so filling this table doesn't mean any work to a developer, it can be only a framework).

Editing that text file is not going to be any easier or faster than editing the font using the tool I showed you. GIMP is not going to provide ways to fix your fonts since there are tools available for this job and GIMP is not a font editor.

What GIMP is going to provide (one day) is ways to adjust letter spacing. You can then "fix" the kerning whereever you think it is wrong. We are however not going to write that info back to the font.

Sven

Sven Neumann (sven@gimp.org) wrote:

What GIMP is going to provide (one day) is ways to adjust letter spacing. You can then "fix" the kerning whereever you think it is wrong. We are however not going to write that info back to the font.

Well, Kerning (as in "fix up this pair of letters") would be useful as a way to achieve certain typographical effects. It would be wrong to fix this on the font level since it would be a one time application.

So support for kerning would be useful but we probably need some support from the pango side to do this.

Bye, Simon

Hi,

Aewyn writes:

As it works in coreldraw, inkscape or other tool. Again:
designer's work is making documents with correct kerning pairs, so manual kerning is the job of designer's tool (here it is gimp).

We don't disagree at all except that I think that you are using the term "kerning" wrongly. What you are asking for is a way to manually adjust letter spacing between individual glyphs. Kerning however is a corrective term for letter spacing that is stored in the font. If you adjust the distance between adjacent glyphs in the text in order to achieve typographical effects (or even to correct incorrect or missing kerning), this isn't called kerning. It's what bug 125483 is all about.

Sven

aewyn@vipmail.hu (2004-09-07 at 1733.59 +0200):

Kerning is alpha and omega of design, and we cannot change any fonts anyhow.

I am with you, and it was explained in the bug the first link references (http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=120268). Users do not care if Pango can or can not, or if even if the lib is called Pango or Ognap. Users want to adjust pairs when they need, so the image they are working with looks as they want, and that is a case by case problem. So I guess the reply is "no kerning in gimp" (yet?).

GSR

On Tue, 2004-09-07 at 17:01 +0200, Sven Neumann wrote:

Editing that text file is not going to be any easier or faster than editing the font using the tool I showed you. GIMP is not going to provide ways to fix your fonts since there are tools available for this job and GIMP is not a font editor.

What GIMP is going to provide (one day) is ways to adjust letter spacing. You can then "fix" the kerning whereever you think it is wrong. We are however not going to write that info back to the font.

Having a way to manually tweak kerning is indeed very useful feature, it doesn't always need to relate to badly designed fonts.

Personally I would find it a lot more useful in a vector editor, since that's what I would be using for logo design, an area where I see this feature essential.

Aewyn, I recommend you open a feature request on this, although convincing Sven of its usefulness is probably a well spent time, because text tool is mostly his effort.

cheers

On Tue, Sep 07, 2004 at 07:16:53PM +0200, Sven Neumann wrote:

As it works in coreldraw, inkscape or other tool. Again:
designer's work is making documents with correct kerning pairs, so manual kerning is the job of designer's tool (here it is gimp).

We don't disagree at all except that I think that you are using the term "kerning" wrongly. What you are asking for is a way to manually adjust letter spacing between individual glyphs. Kerning however is a corrective term for letter spacing that is stored in the font. If you

I think one misconception in this disucssion is that font-kerning would be adequate for typographical work.

This is not the case. Even if you can edit the font, the result will not always look good at all sizes, rotations etc., and manual adjustment is often required (font technology is not optimized for large letters often used in graphics, posters etc.).

adjust the distance between adjacent glyphs in the text in order to achieve typographical effects (or even to correct incorrect or missing kerning), this isn't called kerning.

It is called kerning: he did ask for a way to adjust letter pair spacing and to save this info for later use.

I think that this isn't provided by common font formats to the extent sometimes required for really high quality work. I do not think that the kerning table he asked for should be automatically applied to all sizes of that font (but might be wrong).

Hi,

Jakub Steiner writes:

Aewyn, I recommend you open a feature request on this, although convincing Sven of its usefulness is probably a well spent time, because text tool is mostly his effort.

I am convinced and there is a feature request for this already. It's the one that I have already mentioned two times in this thread. Of course Aewyn can open a new one but he shouldn't be surprised if it becomes marked as a duplicate of bug #125483.

Sven

Hi,

Aewyn writes:

All I need is (love ;) just change the space between two letters (and independently change the global spacing of course).

If you need any help for implement it (plan the gui, the concept, testing, or anything else) I will do.

The GUI for global letter and word spacing should be rather straight-forward (actually it is mostly implemented already). I am not yet sure how individual letter spacing would best be controlled, so you could indeed help me by outlining how you think such a user interface should look like. Perhaps even draw a mockup of it.

Sven