User Guide

The only control you get to modify in the Easy mode is the
one which determines how close (or how far apart) the
spacing should be.
Here’s an example: We opened up the font TFHabitat, and
demolished the spacing by setting each letter’s width to 450.
As you might expect, it looks kind of lousy; however, this is
what you get after having drawn a typeface without setting
any spacing.
Now, rather than manually and painstakingly setting
different widths for each character, we’ll simply have
Fontographer Auto Space the font! This is the result of an
Easy mode Auto Space, with the value “60” entered using
the slider:
That’s a little loose for our taste; let’s Auto Space again,
this time with a value of “25”:
As you can see, Auto Spacing is as easy as choosing a
value, and seeing if you like the result! Any characters that
have spacing you don’t like can easily be tweaked in the
Metrics Window.
Auto Spacing, as you can probably imagine, is not the
fastest operation you can perform on the computer. It is
very much calculation-intensive, and may seem a bit slow
(between half a minute and a minute is not at all
uncommon, but it depends on the speed and power of your
computer). Nevertheless, that is at least one hundred times
faster than we could have set the spacing by hand, so
we’re not complaining too much!
There is a lot more to Auto Spacing; it’s extra controls are
Fontographer User's Manual
5: Metrics: Spacing and Kerning Page #8