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

[William F. Maddock]

-----Original Message-----
>From: John Jason Jordan <johnxj at comcast.net>
>Sent: Feb 3, 2010 10:33 PM
>To: scribus at lists.scribus.net
>Subject: Re: [scribus] A New Concept of Character Spacing? (was Re: Why scribus lacks letter-spacing?)
>
>On Thu, 4 Feb 2010 04:31:47 +0300
>Alexandre Prokoudine <alexandre.prokoudine at gmail.com> dijo:
>
>>On 2/4/10, William F. Maddock wrote:
>
>>> What if we could, well, revamp the entire concept of character
>>> spacing in such a way that kerning would no longer be needed?
>
>>http://typophile.com/node/66574
>>http://code.google.com/p/sortsmill/
>
>How do these concepts compare to InDesign's optical character spacing?

I'm not sure, but I THINK my idea is a simpler concept. It would involve the font designer, at the design stage, setting the "close approach" value for the font (that is, how close any two visible glyphs should approach each other at their closest points). On the layout end, the engine would find where that close approach would be for each of the visible-glyph pairs in use and set that close approach to the value previously set for the font. No exceptions, no epicycles, no Ptolemy. The engine would not care which glyphs are involved; it just finds the closest approach for that pair and sets it to the "close approach" value for that font.