I have a design degree and have spent time roughing out kerning pairs in FontForge, so while I'm sure I'm not the most qualified person in the world, I do have a bit of cred here.
Kerning is hard, not just because of the skill you need to eyeball things well but because there is so much variance to account for. Very tedious.
That said, I think there's an art to it, so it's probably fine that I disagreed with some of the choices.
With Quijote, I wanted the u closer to the Q than the solution did. When I got to Toronto I tried to remember that, and ended up with a low score because the T and o were a lot closer together that time.
I dunno. Hard to nail down. But fun! Nice project.
I think it's because the game is using a different font for each "round" (indicated in the bottom left corner), so there is no consistency across rounds. It would've been easier to learn/guess the "solutions" that way, but I think it's also interesting to see the different kerning decisions across different fonts.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t optical kerning a fallback option for fonts that have no special kerning rules? When would you use it over the font designer’s hand-specified kerning?
All my knowledge of keming came from roundabout sources, but I think there are some pretty serous sources. I've never gotten around to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computers_and_Typesetting but that's a pretty serious start.
There's the normal stuff about rivers and lakes, but from the game Toronto is a kinda funny one, To ronto, what's ronto? why are you going there? I think there's a good amount of looking for potential mis-parses, and making sure the reader never slips out of reading, and is forced to re parse.
Once in a former life, I was an assistant editor for a place that would do a lot of work for commercials with ad agencies. There was one client in particular that was known to be difficult to work with specifically because they thought of themselves as very particular about the kerning of their on screen text. After a while, the editor would get annoyed with the constant tweaking "a little more, a little bit less, perfect". So as a test, the editor just started tapping the keyboard to sound like key presses but without hitting a key to adjust the kerning. The same "a little more, a little less, perfect". The editor then just started doing what needed to be done, and then played the client's little game with new rules.
An interesting game! Something to note is letters in typefaces are usually kerned in pairs—meaning when you tackle all the tricky pairs in a typeface, most problems are gone, such as when an angular letter meets a round one e.g. wo or a capital letter like an umbrella meeting most lowercase letters e.g. To, and some uppercase e.g TA. A lot of the 'problems' to solve in this game just wouldn't happen.
If you were to tweak the game to build typography skills it'd be about pairs and you would have to look at the typeface at different sizes. In addition there are poorly kerned typefaces out there which show what happens when no or little kerning exists. You'll find all the common places kerning is required.
Also would be fun to consider ligatures (joined letter pairs e.g. fl) that are possible too. A more stylistic way to deal with spacing between letters.
In short, cute game. Not quite a real-world practice tool!
Edit: the best version of this game would be to make a (or edit an open license) typeface :D and kern it
I tried a few of the fonts.
I never really liked monospace
but I really dislike making decisions.
If I had to make a font,
I'd probably use monospace.
My understanding is the whole problem goes away with monospace, right?
Edit:
I am having a difficult time articulating my thoughts on this.
Let me just spell it out:
I think I can recognize truly horrible kerning.
It makes it very difficult to read.
However, the flip side is hard.
I don't think about kerning when things work (most of the time).
And I can't tell kerning issues from for example when I needed to use some Microsoft Windows Server machine who remembers back when and it didn't have ClearType.
All I can tell is it is difficult for me to read.
I can't really explain why.
The flip side, recognizing good kerning I think is very difficult for me.
I simply never think about it.
For computer science people, maybe think of it as a satisfiability problem?
It is fairly easy for a human to do the boolean satisfiability verification (where true is illegible and false is NOT illegible).
However, as soon as you turn boolean satisfiability verification to something like k-sat, now the classification becomes (almost?) impossible because it is now subjective?
Back to my simple terms, how can you say one kerning is better than another?
Does it depend on the opinion of the person reading?
Come to think of it, is kerning different in languages other than English?
Everything I have said so far is all about English...
> if you really hate someone, teach them to recognize bad kerning.
The city I'm living in was once famous for its printing history and there's a whole part of town full of old printworks that have slowly been converted to high price housing. One of the converted buildings has a stairwell that's fully visible through windows and it has in large vinyl letters different names of fonts in that specific font all over the walls. Like "papyrus" in Papyrus, "helvetica" in Helvetica, etc.
And the kerning of those words is just the worst. It's so bad, you'd think that there are random spaces in those words.
The kerning hurts my eyes. The irony pains me a few centimeters deeper.
I think this game somewhat agrees with you, because you can score 100% even if it looks like the deviation from the “solution” is not negligible. On the other side I think that “really good kerning” probably matters when it comes to type which is supposed to be looked at for a long time, or when it comes to graphics with much text, it feels like that good kerning consistency adds up to an overall more pleasant sight.
I didn't know it stopped and gave you a total score after a while. I figured it just kept going, and got bored at "gargantuan". At that point my scores ware bimodel - either 100 or 80 depending on whether the font agreed with my spacing next to the leading capital letter.
Never done any font design. Initially I was getting 70s, but after playing it a few times over the last few weeks I think I've gotten the hang of it. Mid 90s on average now.
93/100 here, wonder if there’s a difference between mobile and desktop? I played on mobile and being able to bring my phone right up close to my eyes seemed to make it easier to judge the spacing than if I’d done it at my desk.
Me too. The biggest issue is size. Fonts are cut to be typeset at certain sizes.
Kerning depends on size. The smaller the font is displayed, the more it likely it is used for text were uniform looking kerning depends more on the upper third of a character.
However, this page displays the fonts large, very large, depending on what display you look at it.
So this has to be taken into account for the 'solution'. And furthermore, since the display is large, like a headline or logo, the kerning should consider the whole character, not just the upper part.
Lastly that font size may we'll be against the intend of the typographer who cut the resp. font.
I.e. if the font's internal kerning is used, that would then become an unreliable measure for 'correctness'.
Kerning is hard, not just because of the skill you need to eyeball things well but because there is so much variance to account for. Very tedious.
That said, I think there's an art to it, so it's probably fine that I disagreed with some of the choices.
With Quijote, I wanted the u closer to the Q than the solution did. When I got to Toronto I tried to remember that, and ended up with a low score because the T and o were a lot closer together that time.
I dunno. Hard to nail down. But fun! Nice project.