[reportlab-users] Kerning experiments

[Dinu Gherman]

Hi,

two days ago I met a font designer during a Python meeting
who complained about non existing kerning in RL and explaind
to me a great deal about the importance of the matter.

I know the discussion against using kerning in the Paragraph
class of Platypus, but I thought it might be worth having
kerning at least for more visible text like headlines.

So I gave it a try and fiddled with TrueType specs in order
to use the kerning table for string drawing. The result so far
is encouraging, although I need to make many more tests with
many more fonts.

One nice thing about this approach is that you can modify
the kerning manually without modifying the font, if only, be-
cause, apparently, the kerning info is not always accurate or
"good enough".

Nevertheless, I am attaching a sample PDF for those who care.
There, I changed the kerning in line 3 to make it more com-
patible with my visual expectations...

In theory one could also use fancy features like perpendicular
kerning etc, but that's left for a future exercise.

Regards,

Dinu

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Dinu C. Gherman
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