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Sibelius and font kerning

Posted: 11 Aug 2018, 11:40
by subcontrabombarde
Hi font experts,

currently I am creating a custom chords font for Sibelius.
The positioning and margins of the glyphs are intricate, but I managed to position everything quite well, so that the overall spacing looks consistent.

But now I stumbled upon a problem:
Some of the possible glyph combinations need manual kerning adjustment. Using FontForge, I have created some kerning pairs in order to address this issue. In FontForge everything looks nice, but in Sibelius the glyphs are displayed at standard position, as if there were no kerning pairs at all.

Is Sibelius unable to read kerning pair information from font files?
Or is there a special method of creating kerning pairs, so that Sibelius can get the information, too?

Thanks for your help!

Re: Sibelius and font kerning

Posted: 11 Aug 2018, 12:45
by OCTO
I faced a similar problem when trying to enter ligatures in order to "latinise" the greek, such as ∂ into d͜h.
Two aspects were problematic here: Sibelius cannot accept input from the HEX Input and is very problematic using anything behind 255 slots. Yes, it is an unicode software, but also with many problems.

p.s. I am not a font expert, just a 'tweaker' for my needs and solving problems.

Re: Sibelius and font kerning

Posted: 11 Aug 2018, 20:45
by liuscorne
Have you checked how Sibelius fonts (Opus etc.) handle this problem? If I remember correctly, Sibelius has some unusual solutions for standard font problems (e.g. within the Opus Chords font). Maybe it is enough to replicate the way symbols are positioned within Opus Chords etc.

Re: Sibelius and font kerning

Posted: 12 Aug 2018, 23:51
by subcontrabombarde
Thanks for your suggestions!
Unfortunately, I have not yet been able to solve the problem.

The 255 slots and HEX problems do not bother me, because I took the Opus Chords font and replaced every glyph with the appropriate symbol from my house style text font. So everything is in the place Sibelius expects it to be.

Also I couldn't learn from the original Opus Chords font, because it doesn't have any kerning pairs (and is therefore poorly kerned in my opinion).

Any other suggestions?
Has anyone ever created kerning pairs for a font manually which were then displayed correctly in Sibelius?

Thanks!

Re: Sibelius and font kerning

Posted: 13 Aug 2018, 12:31
by OCTO
There are numerous settings available when exporting a font from FF, I don't know if some of them can solve it?
http://designwithfontforge.com/en-US/Th ... Files.html

Re: Sibelius and font kerning

Posted: 13 Aug 2018, 12:43
by Christof Schardt
Displaying Chordsymbols means in general: put symbols from different fonts in different sizes next to each other in different directions. I assume that sibelius does not use kerning information, because it is only appliable for glyphs of the same font and size and running left to right and so it does not contribute to the solution. Rather it would infer with the positioning, and that has to be avoided. So most probably kerning info is discarded for fonts applied to chord symbols.

Re: Sibelius and font kerning

Posted: 14 Aug 2018, 07:51
by OCTO
Does kerning work with Lyrics in Sibelius? That could solve it- perhaps.