Re: [ft-devel] Peter Wiegel's auto spacing idea

[Alexei Podtelezhnikov]

>> I think, that could work like this: the software has to build and
>> you conture around any glyphe, in a way that the distance to the
>> outline of the glyphe is depending on its form, so that the  new
>> outline is closer to sharp edges then to straight lines. this could
>> be done in the way I have described in the attached graphic.
>>
>> First I have made a pixel copy of my letters. Then I have blurred
>> this little picture and after that I had reduced all the gray pixels
>> to black. this new picture can be traced, so I get a new outline
>> around my glyphes. The next step is to move all the glyphs to
>> gether, until the new outline we get in touch, so it must be
>> possible to calculate a good value for this kerning pair. this could
>> be done automatically with all glyphs in the font, or even with all
>> possible combinations in any language.
>
> Sounds nice.  I think it's not necessary to trace at all: Since
> kerning for Latin fonts works in the horizontal direction only, it's
> fully sufficient to work with the blurred bitmaps, shifting two glyphs
> together until they touch.
>
> It would be nice to see a font specimen sheets with kerns computed
> this way, using various blurring radii.
>

It sounds too complicated for me. We know how to do Cbox for any
glyph. We can split the rectangle into 4 quadrants and see is it is
narrower at the top-right and by how much. If the next glyph is
narrower at the bottom-left, squeeze them together - boom!

It may be less mathematical but kerning is about what's going on at
the margins, not about 4th momenta.