[scribus] A New Concept of Character Spacing? (was Re: Why scribus lacks letter-spacing?)

[Alexandre Prokoudine]

On 2/4/10, William F. Maddock wrote:

>> Give me a definition and I might be inclined to implement that.
>
> Briefly returning from lurk mode...
>
> This conversation started me thinking (which can, of course, be a
> dangerous thing):
>
> What if we could, well, revamp the entire concept of character spacing
> in such a way that kerning would no longer be needed? Instead of basing
> any given character's space on the widest part of that character's
> glyph, why not make it relativistic? In other words, the character
> spacing would be defined as the closest approach between any two glyphs.
> Take the word "You", for example. Instead of defining the right edge of
> the "Y" glyph as the furthest right visible portion of the glyph, you
> would instead be defining the closest approach of the visible portions
> of the "Y" glyph to the visible portions of the "o" glyph, and you would
> do the same for the "o" and the "u" and any other pair of glyphs.
> Instead of having an almost Ptolemaic system like we have now, with the
> special settings for certain pairs of glyphs being akin to the epicycles
> of Ptolemy's view of the heavenly bodies, we would simply have a single
> setting that would say, "This is how close I want any two characters of
> this face to approach each other (other than the space characters, of
> course)."
>
> Am I completely crazy, or does this idea have merit?

http://typophile.com/node/66574
http://code.google.com/p/sortsmill/

Alexandre