xdpx9 kerning problem

[FLySOLO]

hey,

just found a bug in the new pro version of xara.

if you look at the attached image you see xara on the left side and illustrator on the right.

xara doesn't kern (spacing between characters) the exo (popular family from googlefonts) font below correctly.

the above font is arial which is kerned correctly by xara. i already tried to deinstall the font. tried to install within xara and tried to install the font the windows way.

edit-----------------------------------------------------



tried some more googlefonts:

archivo and signika work, dosis doesn't. (all installed within xara with the new googlefonts window.



bb,

Fly

[steve.ledger]

No attachment

[FLySOLO]

sorry - forgot it - just added.

bb,

Fly

[FLySOLO]

hey,

i've done more testing. see the attached screenshot.

on the left is xara and fonts without kerning are marked red.
on the right is illustrator with all fonts using kerning correctly.

the fonts are all installed within xara and come from google web fonts.

why does xara use the kerning from some fonts (the black fonts in the left row) and why does it ignore other fonts?

bb,

Fly

[wuerthne]

There are different kinds of kerning. Traditional TrueType/PostScript kerning and OpenType kerning. At the moment Xara programs access all fonts via traditional Windows font system calls, which are not OpenType aware, so OpenType features are not available. The Windows font system claims that this font has not got any kerning information.

[mwenz]

There are different kinds of kerning. Traditional TrueType/PostScript kerning and OpenType kerning. At the moment Xara programs access all fonts via traditional Windows font system calls, which are not OpenType aware, so OpenType features are not available. The Windows font system claims that this font has not got any kerning information.

Didn't check the others, but Exo has kerning tables.

Mike

[FLySOLO]

hey,

now i tried the same fonts in powerpoint (left screen - middle xara - right illustrator)

color red means: no kerning. any explanation from the developers so i could stop my tests?

of course all tried fonts have kerning information as you can see in illustrator. i haven't installed corel to check this but i guess it would behave like illustrator. can anyone confirm?

bb,

Fly

[mwenz]

I think the issue is the GPOS kerning table (TrueType OpenType format) versus the kern table kerning. MS Word, and I suppose all MS products, do not like kerning pairs that are not mapped to unicode and then rejects all kerning pairs rather than mapping those pairs that are mapped to unicode. It appears that perhaps Xara is doing the same thing.

Newer Microsoft fonts have only GPOS kerning tables--which makes them useless to Word, etc. Ironic, sort of. These are TrueType-flavored OpenType fonts (the GPOS only fonts). With PostScript flavored OpenType fonts, the OS creates a limited number of kerning pairs from the GPOS on the fly for Western code page characters.

So Xara needs to at some point support GPOS kerning--which is responsible for far more than what one would think of as letter pair kerning.

Mike

[PeteS]

any explanation from the developers so i could stop my tests?

Yes:

There are different kinds of kerning. Traditional TrueType/PostScript kerning and OpenType kerning. At the moment Xara programs access all fonts via traditional Windows font system calls, which are not OpenType aware, so OpenType features are not available. The Windows font system claims that this font has not got any kerning information.

This information has been logged internally for further investigation.

[FLySOLO]

ah - sorry - overseen it. so i'll do some tests with truetype. would be perfect if xara could kern all fonts now that it understands font weights.