Kerning the Hard Way: A Tale of GSUB and Striped Fonts
2025-03-14
This article details the author's struggle and eventual solution to kerning a unique font featuring vertically striped letterforms. Standard GPOS kerning techniques failed due to overlapping letter parts. The ingenious solution involved GSUB lookups to split letters into left and right components, replacing overlapping sections with custom joiners. This complex process relied heavily on custom Python scripts using the fontTools and fontFeatures libraries. While the font is incomplete, the core kerning challenge has been overcome, offering a novel approach to designing unconventional fonts.
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Design
font design