bochner@bespin.harvard.edu (Harry Bochner) (03/29/90)
I recently ran into the fact that in both Bookman and NewCenturySchoolbook an 'f' followed by a right single quote comes out badly: the quote merges with the hook of the 'f'. What's needed here is kerning, in the sense of a minor adjustment of spacing between two particular characters. This got me to thinking: according to IM 4 FOND's can containing character pair kerning info, and as far as I can tell with ResEdit, these fonts do have such info. I don't know how to tell whether there's an entry for f+' (need a utility that decodes the entries...), but more importantly it's not clear how the info would be used. There are ways to do kerning fairly automatically in PostScript, using kshow, but the PostScript generated by the LaserWriter Driver doesn't seem to use this. The other way to use the kerning info would be to generate movement commands between characters when necessary, like the TeX utility dvi2ps does, but the LaserWriter Driver doesn't do that either. So, my question is, is there any systematic way to make use of the kerning data in a FOND entry? Are there any programs in widespread use that do it? -- Harry Bochner bochner@endor.harvard.edu