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

[William F. Maddock]

On Thu, 2010-02-04 at 04:31 +0300, Alexandre Prokoudine wrote:
> 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/

Well, I'll be...

Not first, but certainly not alone. :-)

Thank you, Alexandre.