Is negative spacing bad practice?

#1

I’ve been working on a very extended, italic display typeface. As I started populating the Fontself panel, I noticed some very large gaps between glyphs.

Doing some quick tests, I had to get into some extreme negative spacing to get things looking correct. I then ran Smart Spacing, and it also applied negative spacing.

Example …

The ‘H’ and ‘a’ in Fontself:
H: -58 (left), -59 (right)
a: 11 (left), -2 (right)

The ‘H’ and ‘a’ in Glyphs app:
H: -58 (left), -57 (right)
a: 12 (left), -2 (right)

I figure those are just rounding errors.

Staying in Glyphs app, if I set the italic angle to 20°, the spacing changes to …

H: 33 (left), 105 (right)
a: 53 (left), 20 (right)

The end result looks the same, but I can’t set an italic angle in Fontself, so it just felt weird, to me.

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#2

Fontself doesn’t support italic angles. Also another area where we want to improve in the future…

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#3

Oh yes, italic angles (didn’t know there’s a word for) would be very helpful.
Please, please :wink:

Friendly greetz
Hybi

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#4

@Yarpy Indeed we doesn’t support Italic angle feature. And to answer your question, I don’t think setting negative values for spacing is a “bad practice”, generally speaking.
As for Italic fonts, Smart Metrics feature tries to keep your glyph centered in its bounding box. It’s a choice and probably not all type designers does it.

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