User Guide

groups (words on the page) do not “hang” together very
tightly, the brain has to work harder to see them in
meaningful ways. That’s why it would be pretty hard to
read this page if:
Itwereprintedlikethisinsteadofwiththecorrectspacing.
In this case the brain has a daunting group-making job to
do. Think of how you feel when reading the unspaced
sentence above. When you read poorly kerned and spaced
text, you get a toned-down version of that same sensation.
So, if you are going to design fonts, you will probably want
to pay attention to the metrical details, out of courtesy to the
people who may use them.
As we said, font metrics is the term used to describe how
letters are spaced when they are typed. This is easy to
imagine if you remember how type used to be set. When
characters were carved on the end of a piece of metal,
each character’s width was (had to be, in fact) the width of
the piece of metal on which it was carved. Setting type was
a matter of laying these pieces of metal down next to each
other; therefore, the spacing was determined exactly by
the width of each piece of metal. To influence the metrics,
you could space the characters further apart by wedging
little thin strips of metal between them. You could even
squeeze the characters closer together by filing down parts
of the metal type. Fundamentally, character spacing was
determined by how wide the metal pieces were. And that’s
still pretty much what we mean by spacing: it’s mostly
determined by how wide the characters are. Letters are set
down one after another, each new character’s position
determined by the width of the previous character. In other
words, each new character starts where the previous one
left off. One of the most impressive features of
Fontographer is its ability to let you control the metrics of
electronic fonts either letter by letter or the entire font,
manually or automatically!
The next exercise shows the power of Fontographer’s
autospacing command. You can autospace an entire font at
once directly from the Font Window. However, in this
exercise, you’ll work in the Metrics Window so you can
see Fontographer autospace interactively on screen. In
addition, we are going to ask you to purposely mess up the
spacing of your characters, so you can see just how
Fontographer User's Manual
5: Metrics: Spacing and Kerning Page #2