I’m personally not a fan of the default templates included with FontSelf for kerning, they aren’t necessarily bad, just incomplete. For completness’ sake, I wrote a script that generates a slightly more organized kerning template.
find it on npm
alternatively you can find my personalized template here
Nice!
How does it work?
Hi!
to run this script you will need at the very least an instance of nodejs, and npm.
the steps to generate your own template would be as follows:
npm i kerning-template) - RECOMMENDEDgit clone https://github.com/mia-cx/kerning-template.git)index.ts file in a text or code editor (Notepad++, VS Code, Atom, Sublime Text)const variables (lowercase and symbols specifically) at the top of the script to include all the characters you include in your typeface, and save the file.npm i; npm start. It will output a file called kerning.txt, which is the generated template.If you prefer a different prefix from the default “NN”/“nn”, which I simply copied from the built-in templates, find line 33 (inside the generateKerningString() function), and change the value of the prefix variable.
As for the logic behind the script, it simply loops over all the characters that are available in the variables declared at the top of the script. Inside each iteration it will loop over these characters again, to append each character to each other character. This ensures that every possible character pair will exist in your template. It pushes all these pairs, along with the “NN”/“nn” prefix into a monstrous array containing all of the pairs, formats it into a string, and spews it out to a text file.
If you think I should write a version that can work in a web browser (e.g. https://jsfiddle.net or even a standalone page), please leave a comment urging me to do so!