This is a message to type designers. Spacing and kerning is often a tedious job and can sometimes take up to 60% of the font development process. It can be frustrating because it requires your time (and time is never enough) and your energy: the most precious resources blocked on a repetitive task when new designs, that could become new fonts, are waiting and new projects have to be conceived. iKern is the result of years of research on autospacing and autokerning and it can produce high quality spacing and kerning in short time. It’s proposed to you as an help to optimize your workflow moving your resources towards the “creative” side.

iKern is offered as a service. I’m the first to understand that it’s not the optimal solution but I dare to offer it because I’m sure that the type designer doesn’t lose control on the font if someone else does the metrics. You can read some testimonies. I’ve also prepared a general description of iKern and its model where I try to explain how glyphs’ shapes determine metrics for the really most part, so the designer remains responsible for “having primed” the metrics themselves. It’s not an exhaustive exposition as the details of a structure often are more important than the design of the structure itself. It’s here just to let you know the field we’re moving in and to make you more confident with the concept. And to let you see how seriously this project has been taken and how useful can be for you. I ask the fonts to be treated to have Unicode compliance and a standard and coherent naming system possibly using extensions. I will generate metrics suitable for a general purpose. The workflow could incorporate some kind of feedback if one really have other needs. Kerning can be written in the ‘kern’ table or in the ‘GPOS’ table in class form at choice.

Martin L. Gore wrote: “Words are very unnecessary”. There are fonts whose metrics have been prepared using iKern to be tested. Your eyes have to be your criterion. iKern has been developed with the Fell Types in mind so take a look at them. More standard fonts are downloadable here. They’re from the Liberation family. You will also find, through these pages, other links to fonts prepared using iKern. Hope you’ll follow them. Or just contact me: I’d be glad to let you test iKern. I’m always looking for good fonts.