Hello,

I am using Inkscape 0.46 under Windows XP. When I draw a text field and insert some text, there is no automatic font kerning perceivable. Is this a bug? Manual kerning does well, but is too much time-consuming.

Best regards, Boris

Hi Boris,

I may be wrong, but are you talking about justify text? Inkscape does have this option.

With the text tool selected, in the Tools Control Bar, right of the Font and Size selector, you have...

Align Left, Center, Align Right, Justify.

Justify will automatically kern your text to the text box.

Cheers

Jaws wrote:Align Left, Center, Align Right, Justify.
Justify will automatically kern your text to the text box.
Cheers

Sadly, that is not what I am searching for. I mean the kerning pairs provided by the font, i.e. if you type "We", the letter "e" will typically be moved a little bit under the "W" to avoid a white hole between these two letters whereas in case of "Wl" the "l" won't be moved near to the "W". What pairs of letters to treat in the first way is part of the definition of a font and is provided by a list of kerning pairs coming with the true type or postscript files of the font. Cheers, Boris

And you're saying that you do not see this defined kerning in fonts that you use in Inkscape, that you see in other uses of the same font?

[Edit -- Could zooming be exaggerating a poorly defined font?]

I doubt Inkscape considers this a bug or a needed feature since it's neither a word processor nor a desktop publishing application. I won't presume to speak for the developers, but any kerning that's appropriate for the things Inkscape is used for is already included, namely manual kerning.

Automatic kerning is used by top flight fonts in applications that are appropriate for it's use. Kerning body text is rarely needed, whereas headline text can easily be kerned in Inkscape without consuming much time.

Cheers

Guest wrote:I am using Inkscape 0.46 under Windows XP. When I draw a text field and insert some text, there is no automatic font kerning perceivable. Is this a bug? Manual kerning does well, but is too much time-consuming.

For me the answer is LaTeX, but I can't get the LaTeX plugin working in Inkscape, so I import text in the form of PDFs made using XeLaTeX. The file below was made with Inkscape and compares a passage of fully-justified XeLaTeX text with the same passage set in Inkscape. I think you'll not need telling which one was made with XeLaTeX . It's very quick to do once you get the hang of it and of course you can use all of the features of Fontspec too.

http://confound.me.uk/images/text_test.pdf

Regards, N.

nick_h wrote:For me the answer is LaTeX, but I can't get the LaTeX plugin working in Inkscape

That's a bad message for me, since I use LaTeX for the whole document and intended to import some diagrams made by Inkscape via EPS. Actually, that was the reason why I have noticed that Inkscape doesn't kern at all. I saw the kerned text from LaTeX and the not-kerned texts in diagrams between. That is quite remarkable and, for me, a reason not to use Inkscape. Can someone propose an alternative? Many thanks for a hint.

Best regards, Boris

Boris wrote:there is no automatic font kerning perceivable.

There's some kerning going on. In my test of everybody's favourite word "foo", using "Times New Roman", the rightmost part of the "f" is over the first "o". I get almost identical results in Inkscape, Gimp, and MS Word.

Is your font to blame, rather than Inkscape?

Slow Dog wrote:There's some kerning going on. In my test of everybody's favourite word "foo", using "Times New Roman", the rightmost part of the "f" is over the first "o". I get almost identical results in Inkscape, Gimp, and MS Word.

You're right, I could reproduce your obervations, but thereby, the whole issue becomes more mysterious. In MS Word and Inkscape, the kerning of "foo", "fu" or "f," looks good, using Times New Roman and default settings concerning fonts and spacing. But, on contrary, there is no kerning perceivable in "We", "Wu" or "W,", and I suppose in every case in which an upper case letter is involved. If you explicitely enable kerning in MS Word, the kerning of "We" and so on will work well und will be quite noticable. But in Inkscape, it still looks poor. Besides, in Open-Office, the kerning is activated by default and, therefore, phrases like "We" or "Wu" look good from the very beginning. A confusing fact.

Best regards, Boris

And I concur with your observations. The Gimp also kerns "We".

General web searching happened to find an Inkscape Bug Report on the subject (https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/219864) that no-one's looking at. Perhaps it all works under Linux, while the Windows version default behaviour is like that of Word, but without the "Turn it on for capitals" switch.

Slow Dog wrote:General web searching happened to find an Inkscape Bug Report on the subject (https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/219864) that no-one's looking at.

A bad message. But that's it what I have suspected. Is it possible to bring someone to look at this issue?

Slow Dog wrote:Perhaps it all works under Linux, while the Windows version default behaviour is like that of Word, but without the "Turn it on for capitals" switch.

It doesn't work under Linux either. I have just tested under Suse 11.1. Additionally, some googling revealed that also a MacOS X user is complaining about this fact. It seems to be a general bug of Inkscape.

With Open-Office Draw, I have found a program to manage the diagrams I need for my project, but in general, Inkscape provides more functions and is, at least for me, way easier to use. It's a great pity that it has got this unaesthetic bug. I hope it will be fixed.

Can someone please try the development version on windows and other OSes too?

I can't reproduce it on ubuntu Jaunty.

prkos wrote:Can someone please try the development version on windows and other OSes too?

I have just tested the actual developer version (Inkscape 0.46+devel r21345, built May 13 2009) on Windows XP. The result is the same, using Times New Roman and the default settings: Kerning among minuscles and punctation marks does well, but no kerning is perceivable between capitals and minuscles, capitals and capitals, capitals and punctation marks, and (to my surprise) between some minuscles and punctation marks, e.g. "f." does, but "v." doesn't kern.

Best regards, Boris

I've finally got round to doing a couple of comparison samples. First, The Gimp:



Then, Inkscape:



It should be clear that Inkscape doesn't kern the capitals in this case.

Is this perhaps an SVG thing? How do other SVG viewers display that same content?

microUgly wrote:Is this perhaps an SVG thing? How do other SVG viewers display that same content?

That's an interesting question. Looking at the SVG, there's no per-character positioning information in my non-manually-kerned sample.

So, with the viewers I've access to:
Firefox looks the same as Inkscape, i.e. it doesn't kern the capitals.
Internet Explorer with Adobe's svg plugin look like the GIMP, i.e. itdoes kern the capitals.
And Irfanview is just hopeless.

I'm kinda lazy and don't want to creat your example can you attach the svg to this topic and I'll check in Opera (I find Opera to be pretty accurate). I might also try Batik.

Here's the sample:



/Edit Hmm. Svg tags don't do what I expected. The file's here:
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/m.borman/Kerning.svg

It didn't render at all well in Firefox from home until I changed default font to Time New Roman.

Slow Dog wrote:/Edit Hmm. Svg tags don't do what I expected.

Strange. Displays ok in Opera but not FF. I'll check that out.

Opera doesn't do the kerning either. I might post on the mailing list to see what the devs says.

microUgly wrote:

Slow Dog wrote:/Edit Hmm. Svg tags don't do what I expected.

Strange. Displays ok in Opera but not FF. I'll check that out.

I now think that it's not svg tags, but some Firefox weirdness. My post (and the link opened directly in a broswer) shows up as code at home (hence my "Hmm"), but as an image at work. Both in Firefox, but some different settings and plugins.

It's 2012 now and inkspace is version 0.48.3. the font's kerning is applied in the linux version of inkscape, but still not in the windows version. The gimp2 does kern under both operating systems, so the problem must be with inkscape. Why are the windows and linux versions so different from each other? Is there nothing we can do to make our windows version kern like the linux version?

The automatic kerning feature is actually very important to me, because my svgs include lots of text and I can't install linux on my pc because I need windows for other programs. So please give me a solution, I don't like using illustrator. >_<