User Guide

programs (with kerning).
The other drawback to pair kerning is that the more kerning
pairs you make for your font, the bigger and slower it
becomes. Granted, it won’t make the font tremendously
slower or bigger, but it can become noticeable in extreme
cases. Most commercial font vendors ship their fonts with
between 100 and 4,000 pairs per font. 100 pairs is
certainly ‘way’ too few (except for a monospaced font, in
which case it is ‘way’ too many!); 4,000 pairs is clearly (to
us, anyway) a sign that the font was poorly spaced, and had
to be compensated for by over-kerning it. A happy medium
might be somewhere between 400 and 1,500 pairs,
depending upon the typeface, and nature of the particular
type designer. For example, some people like to kern all the
characters in the font, even pairs like É, or , rather than just
the most commonly used ones, which will naturally result in
more kerning pairs.
Now that you know the basics of font metrics, let’s cut right
to the good stuff: Auto Spacing and Auto Kerning (located
in the Metrics menu)!
Auto Spacing
Auto Spacing is one of the most incredible features in
Fontographer. As of this writing, Fontographer is the only
program we know of that is capable of doing it. Auto
Spacing is the process by which Fontographer will examine
your entire font, and give each character the best possible
spacing value that it can. It is a tremendously valuable, time-
saving command. Some of our famous typographical
customers, while they sort of sniffed at the idea of the
computer algorithmically creating widths and sidebearings
for them, nevertheless allowed that they would certainly
use Auto Spacing at least as a starting point.
Auto Spacing comes in two flavors: Easy, and Advanced.
Easy is what the casual user should choose: its parameters
have already been set to do the best job for typical fonts. If
you are really into spacing, you can switch to the
Advanced mode, where you have the opportunity to change
lots of values and parameters.
Fontographer User's Manual
5: Metrics: Spacing and Kerning Page #7