Sidebearings analysis of alphabet letters with complex shape

Abstract

Defining inter-letter space is important part of typeface designing process. The purpose of defining the letter space is to make them visually equally distant from each other within words, sentences and paragraphs creating an even value of grey, without darker or lighter areas. Different approaches for determining letter space were developed in order to facilitate this demanding process. Miguel Sousa (2006) and Walter Tracy (2003) proposes their spacing methods and in paper of De Melo Vargas (2007) and our previous work (Banjanin & Nedeljković, 2014) these methods were tested. The problems occur when defining space around letters a, f, g, s, t, z, and S, for which neither Sousa nor Tracy propose any kind of guidelines (except visual). The aim of this paper is to measure and analyse spacing values for these letters and to see if there is some kind of “formula” or some kind of guidelines which will broaden existing methods in more accurate way. We measured left and right sidebearings of these 7 problematic letters and established additional guidelines for defining letter space of those letters more accurately.