Kerning pairs not working, Windows

[Kyungjoon Lee]

Kerning pairs for Ta and AV not working on Windows.

If you use DejaVu Sans, then the 'a' should be partly under the upper stroke of the 'T'.

A testcase using AV is attached. The letters on top should be similar to the letters on the bottom.

 In my case, kerning pairs work with Firefox, Notepad, GIMP, and Abiword with Windows.

[Kyungjoon Lee (kjoonlee)]

Oops, adding more obvious testcase

[Kyungjoon Lee (kjoonlee)]

Bump. Could someone decide an importance for this bug, please? Thanks. :)

[prkos (prkos)]

I can confirm the automatic font kerning doesn't work on WinXP, build 21345.

There's a discussion about it on inkscape forum http://www.inkscapeforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=3153&start=0

It has been reported there that only capital letters don't kern but I observed it also in this case: "w," using Times New Roman.
It was also mentioned that the bug appears in Suse 11.1 and MacOS but I can only confirm it works on ubuntu Jaunty and doesn't work on winXP.

[George Yohng (georgeis)]

I think this is quite important for designers, as automatic kerning correction makes text look evenly spaced, accounting individual letter shapes. It is very tedious to adjust this manually for a text block.

[inkor (ink4life)]

I agree, it's very very important.
Hope it will be fixed in 0.48

[inkor (ink4life)]

I forgot to say: I'm using 0.47 r22583 (built Nov 21 2009) on Windows 7 (I thought it should have been fixed since r22570)

[inkor (ink4life)]

Sorry! -> It works when I disable the textflow (Text->Unflow)

[Kyungjoon Lee (kjoonlee)]

I'm running Inkscape 0.47 r22583, built Nov 21 2009 on Windows 7 as well, but kerning pairs still don't work.

Where can I find more info about this being fixed since r22570? Thanks.

[Philipp Prause (inkscape-phipra)]

Conform.
Using r22583 on Windows XP. Kerning of AV does not work. It just looks awful, and would require a huge amount of manual work if you have longer text.
Choosing "Text -> unflow" did not help.

[Kyungjoon Lee (kjoonlee)]

Could this be related in any way to how Windows and Linux use
different interfaces to get at the same font information?

It's been two years now; could someone please assign this bug to
somebody, please? Thanks.

On Fri, May 28, 2010 at 6:10 PM, Philipp Prause <email address hidden> wrote:
> Conform.
> Using r22583 on Windows XP. Kerning of AV does not work. It just looks awful, and would require a huge amount of manual work if you have longer text.
> Choosing "Text -> unflow" did not help.
>
> --
> Kerning pairs not working, Windows
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/219864
> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
> of the bug.
>

[CV (cvaron)]

Hi - I very much appreciate all of the new features in Inkscape as well as the bugs that have been resolved. I really hope that making kerning pairs work in Windows will get attention from the Inkscape developers. It appears to have been outstanding for more than 3 years now. I love Inkscape and prefer it to Illustrator in many many ways. However, lack of automatic kerning makes Inkscape unsuitable for most work that includes typesetting.

I would be so grateful if this bug could get a higher priority with an assignment to a developer.

Thank you once again for contributing your time and energy to produce such a fantastic software.

[Aaron Curtis (substantialnoninfringinguser)]

This is crucial! It makes inkscape unusuable!

[ScislaC (scislac)]

First off, exclamation marks don't help anything. If it's unusable to you, feel free to use something else, we're not exactly ripping you off. ;)

As for the requests to assign this to someone, unfortunately, that's not how these things work. This project is the work of volunteers who are (mostly) unpaid and they work on things that are mainly what they know or what they are interested in. Developers interested in taking on a bug, assign the bugs to oneself. While I know most computer users use Windows, most of our developers do not. Given that, it's even harder to find someone who would be interested in looking into this.

Note: I said mostly as every summer we have students who participate in Google's Summer of Code. However, the students propose what they are interested in working on, and the contract is between Google and the student.

[jazzynico (jazzynico)]

Reproduced with Inkscape 0.48.3.1.
Not reproduced with the trunk, revision 11600.

Maybe a devlibs issue. If it's the case, it could also be fixed in 0.48.4.

[Kyungjoon Lee (kjoonlee)]

I noticed that with Inkscape 0.47, this only affects the canvas; the preview was OK.
With recently nightlies, it is reversed: this now affects the preview, the canvas is now OK.

Entered new bug, bug 1049455: Kerning pairs not working in previews, Windows