fine tuning kerns

For feedback and discussion for testers of the MathTime Professional II fonts.

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Michael Spivak
Posts: 52
Joined: Mon Oct 10, 2005 2:10 pm

fine tuning kerns

Post by Michael Spivak »

The following humongous document shows basically all pairs of characters
in the "math italic" font, so that you can see the kerning between every pair.
Only a maniac like me would try to look through the whole list, but if you have some characters and/or pairs that you use frequently, and that you would like to check on, you can find them here. If some pairs don't look
right, then I can change the kerning in the font. I'll leave this open for
a long time, in order to accomodate as many suggestions as possible
before we post the final version of the fonts.


http://support.pctex.com/files/JWPXMWRZ ... rntest.pdf
zedler
Posts: 15
Joined: Fri Mar 03, 2006 1:50 am

Re: fine tuning kerns

Post by zedler »

I find the pairs involving \Theta, \Omega, \Phi quite tight. On the other hand, comparing mtpro2 with Y&Y's mathtime the equations take quite a bit of extra space.

Michael
Michael Spivak
Posts: 52
Joined: Mon Oct 10, 2005 2:10 pm

Re: fine tuning kerns

Post by Michael Spivak »

zedler wrote:I find the pairs involving \Theta, \Omega, \Phi quite tight. On the other hand, comparing mtpro2 with Y&Y's mathtime the equations take quite a bit of extra space.

Michael
I very much appreciate your looking at kernings, and will try to fix things up as much as possible.

I'll take a look at the \Theta, \Omega, \Phi question.

Meanwhile, I have already been working on the kerning. So far, all I have done is tighten up the kerning in pairs (a-z)(anything). I will be sending a new tfm file separately, so if you want you can try things out.


I would be interested if you could send me a pdf with some equations in the old mathtime, so I could compare with the new MTProII fonts.

However, there are a couple of things to remember concerning the extra space that the equations take up compared with the old mathtime.

1. The letters in the old mathtime were taken directly from the Adobe Times-Italic. The letters in MathTimePro were taken from the Monotype
Times New Roman-Italic font; in the new MTProII, the letters are closer
to the Monotype versions than to the Adobe versions. One thing this means is that the italic letters are generally wider. I felt that this was OK, even good, since it made the math stand out more (Knuth similarly made his math italic letters a bit wider than his text italic ones). Actually, however, I suspect that the difference is a bit too big when one is using
Adobe Times as the text font, because Adobe's Times is really quite condensed (the Adobe Times Ten might be better). I actually never use
Adobe's Times because of this. It I wanted Times as the text font I would probably use either the Monotype Times (which is actually a bit too uncondensed!) or try Adobe's Times Ten. [In practice, I always use the Monotype Baskerville (quite different from other Baskervilles, by the way)
as my text font, and I find---with the proper scaling to match x-heights---that the MTPro fonts work well with it.]

2. I suspect that this accounts for most of the difference in the widths of equations, but I've also made a decision that one might or might not agree with. If you look at the words "foxy" or "sexy" in Adobe Times-Italic, you'll se that the x and y are very close, almost touching, and I've noticed the same thing when xy appears in an equation in books typeset in Times. But although one reads text a whole word at a time, in a math equation the combination xy is not part of a word, and it seems to me that
it's better if there's a tiny bit more space between the x and y, since one really has to read them as two different numbers, not as a pair.
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