From: Asmus Freytag (asmusf@ix.netcom.com)
Date: Tue Nov 25 2008 - 01:52:00 CST
On 11/23/2008 9:40 PM, John Hudson wrote:
> Hans Aberg wrote:
>
>> Yes, this might be viewed as a form of kerning.
>
> It is best to avoid confusing mark positioning with kerning, since
> these are necessarily separate procedures. Horizontal spatial
> relationships between letters, including kerning (i.e. pair-specific
> adjustment of individual letter advance widths) needs be independent
> of mark positioning and, indeed, to ignore the presence of mark glyphs
> in the string (except in exceptional cases that are typeface-specific
> and need to be controlled at the font level).
If you kern a pair Wx, where W and x stand as examples for the actual
letters involved, wouldn't it matter if you placed a rather large mark
on top of the x, e.g. one of the Latin superscripted letters? I could
imagine, that in such a case, and across different typeface designs,
there would be a problem tucking in the "x" as far under the Wing of
the W as it would go if it was unadorned.
I think Hans was not too far off in his comparison: there are aspects of
mark placement, that - to a lay person - seem reminiscent of kerning, in
the way that hey depend on the details of the shape of the base
character and accent(s) to allow them to be tucked in more closely. For
kerning, the constraint comes from a desire for uniform type color, for
mark positioning, the constraint comes from the very limited space
available in the line for placing, let alone stacking of accents above
and below characters.
So there are differences as well. I don't think his intention was to
usurp a term from the holy vocabulary ;-)
A./
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