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BubbleKern

BubbleKern is a set of new kerning tools for the Glyphs font editor by Georg Seifert. that is based on the shape of surrounding outlines you draw, which is called a bubble. Once you draw bubbles for all letters, BubbleKern automatically kerns the typeface in seconds. That’s right, you kern by drawing it!

Tutorial: http://youtu.be/TA2RZQivvS0 (the explanation is for version 2 of the plugins. The helper scripts are incorporated into the plugin, now)

A bubble needs to be made as a extra layer in each master, and it has to be named “bubble“. It doesn’t have to be straight segments or single path, and you can draw it however you want. Components automatically inherit the bubbles of base glyphs, so you don’t have to draw one for an accented glyph (for letters like Eth or Tbar, you just draw a bubble for the bar).

When asked to kern, first of all BubbleKern scans through each letter to make an approximation of bubble shape so that it’s faster to calculate. And the temporary dictionary of bubble sidebearings is built for every letter.

Then for a given pair, BubbleKern looks at every scan height, finds where bubbles touch each other first, and kerns by the distance. In the example below, it finds the closest distance of 30 units, and kerns by -30.

As for pairs to kern, a type designer needs to make a checklist for BubbleKern to work with. Don’t worry, there is a script to help you with that.

But why does it not simply look at all possible pairs, every glyph against every other glyph? Because that takes so much time to check, only to create a huge mess. If your font has 600 glyphs, the maximum number of possible pairs is 600²=360,000 which contains meaningless pairs like %& or some other junk that you won’t enjoy cleaning up.

A good tool is something the user can control. BubbleKern will kern a font for you, but only do the obvious, not do some mysterious calculation in the background (e.g. Adobe’s optical kerning). That’s why I leave bubble shapes and pairs to designers.

Contents

Installation

To install the Show Kern Bubbles plugin, double click the plugin file, confirm Confirm the dialog that appears in Glyphs. It will be placed into ~/Library/Application Support/Glyphs 3/Plugins folder. After installation, you need to restart Glyphs. It will show up under View menu as Show Kern Bubbles.

Usage Instructions

The essential part is that you have a layer called "bubble" and run the BubbleKern menu command (in the Edit menu).

  1. Activate the View menu > Show Kern Bubbles viewer plugin.
  2. Make a extra layer and name it "bubble" for every layer you want to kern. Use Make Bubble Layers from the context menu to speed up the process.
  3. Bubble layer dictates the kerning, and generally a bubble needs to be larger. It is important to make the bubble stick to sidebearings somewhere, in order to create zero kerning. (e.g. think about how to avoid creating a kerning value between H and H while using bubbles)
  4. Once you have bubble layer, run BubbleKern, (from the Edit menu) in which you build a list of kerning pairs you want to check. There are two ways to build a list; permutation and plain text.
  5. In BubbleKern, click Kern All Pairs for initial run. When you update a bubble shape of a glyph, run Kern Pairs with Selected Glyphs to update that specific part of kerning data, which is faster.

License

Copyright 2015 Toshi Omagari (@tosche_e).

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

See the License file included in this repository for further details.