On 12/29/2024 1:29 AM, Julius Ross wrote:
Mikael,
Thank you. Your reply is enough for me to understand that I am not
doing anything (obviously) wrong!
I am not sure I have the expertise enough to contribute. But having a
negative kern value in a font move glyphs apart feels more like a sign-
error/bug than a choice/convention.
A next upload will have a better check and catch the issue.
I never use (and rarely see) prescripts in mathematics, and I only
learned of their existence in TeX from your "math in context" document :-)
The opentype math spec certainly implies they were thinking of
postscripts, and I just presumed symmetry. So.for a symmetric letter
(e.g. V) I would expect the presubscript and postsubscript to be placed
symmetrically as they would both be qualifying the variable V.
I'm not sure what they were thinking. It looks a bit like a 'maybe nice'
feature. Even cambria (the reference font) is very incomplete and we
noticed issues (unwanted overlaps) so in the we just ditched the whole
concept as unreliable (other fonts had weird staircase kerns too) and
went for a variant.
That said, it seems that other fonts have not bothered taking care with
this (e.g. STIX has bottom right corner kerns on V but not bottom
left). So perhaps just not worrying too much about prescripts (for
mathematics) is the way to go.
Indeed, a rather inconsistent and semi-random feature. In the end it
doesn't bring much to the table. FWIW, we have discussed this in
articles and progress reports.
Hans
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