Fonts are about text. Many do not realize that GCP text will end up as engraving on some material (wood or stone). THIS is the value of kerning. If it is done manually it sure takes time and I suspect it is one of those jobs that machine excels man.
What do you say Gentlemen? Ask Santa for it?

Hi Georgios,

Have you played around with the Character Spacing?
I had a go with the Times Roman font with a Character Spacing set to zero to get the kerning effect.

Usually fonts for engraving do not have fill. I.e. they are drawn using a single line. CNC tools for engraving follow these lines but of course the tool has a diameter so then when engraved you see the font as having a fill. If character spacing is set to zero it would mean that letters overlap over the fill unless kerning is done manually which is time consuming.

Georgios,

I do not believe that GCP uses a formal kerning table for character spacing (Jim will correct me if I am wrong). Instead it uses an algorithm to space characters based on nominal character widths (somewhat better than Generic CADD's routines) which is normally really good for day-to-day drafting. I suspect that manual "kerning" is where it is at for you.

You probably want to use some single-stroke CAD font such as my GCP-Singlex font (available in the files area) to get the type of "output" you need. What could be done would be to create your own kerning table such that you would optimize distances between any two characters with a given font. You could then read in a line of text (string) and use the Text Place command to place individual characters at some particular size. Thus, if the next two characters in the string are (say) "St," you would have a look-up table that would give a value for the offset for the "t" from the "S" and use that for your position spacing.

This is no trivial effort (which is why nobody has done it yet), but it is just grunt work. In English, there are 52 upper and lower case characters, 10 numbers, 28 punctuation marks, standard symbols, and space characters for a total of 90 total entries that, taken 2 at a time, amount to 4005 permutations that need to be defined. Once you have that data, a macro could be written to parse a text string and generate the desired kerned text.

Take a look at the Text Character Spacing command, it may be good enough for you. If not, the question is, Is there enough time savings for you to do the donkey work required to automate it?

Word processors like WORD do kerning. Is this the way they do it using a kerning table? Anyhow, I fear my macro skills are not a match for such a task. Who knows perhaps Bjorn Holmgren already has a macro for this task.

Hi Georgious,
No I have not looked at this.
What is it that you are wanting to do?
Bjorn

Hey Georgious,

Printing & kerning do not fall into my areas of actual expertise -- just to be clear. However, Aldus PageMaker was a local (western Washington State) products and I used to know several people who worked on kerning tables for that product way back when. There is probably a way to apply topology to the construction of font characters and determine the kerning values, but I know nothing of such an approach.

GCP fonts are based on 1 inch tall characters. Therefore I am going to use inches for my discussion. Basically, you position individual 1 inch tall characters in pairs like, "aa," "ab," "ac," ... "zx," "zy," "zz" -- in every potentially possible combination (and don't forget punctuation) and measure the distance between each adjusted for looks character pair, and create a matrix/table of such adjusted for looks values. That is the work that stops everyone from undertaking this effort.

Once you have the table of adjusted for looks values, it is "merely" an issue of parsing a string by pairs of characters, looking up the adjustment value, multiplying that adjustment value by the inch height of the font you are using, and constructing a character by character array of spaced letters to duplicate the string. The macro to do this last part is conceptually simple -- it will just require something on the order of 4000 /IF comparisons... It is not difficult, just a lot of work. As I said, the question is whether such an effort would save you over doing a manual kerning job by hand when all is said and done?

I'm a n00b here, this is my first post...

I use GCP v7 to make control panels, legend plates and other bits of metal and plastic. The one thing I really miss is the ability to kern manually. Sometimes I just want to nudge the A over a bit towards the T, or perhaps add some more space around the I. PANEL, VOLTS, STATION, & START are words that I type every day and sometimes the lack of proper kerning jumps right out.

Other engraving software allows manual kerning to add or remove space between letters. Is there an easy way to do this with text in GCP?

--David--

Yes. Explode the lettering group twice and then use MP to move the individual letters. Having your grid turned on will help. I can tell you more if you like.

Jim, thank you very much! It worked like a champ first time. After EX, I used WM to move the balance of the text. I've been using GCP for about 4 years now, and still find there's more to learn.

Next, I'll be moving v7 over to a new computer, and only have my v4.1 disc and a link to the upgrade (now gone). Any hints?

Thanks a pile for the help.

--David--

David, we would really appreciate it if you would purchase the upgrade. We really need the support to continue doing what we do.

The small problem I have had the whole time in General Cadd is that any font used does not have smart kerning involved, just a defined space on each side of a character. When characters in a text string such as 'v' and 'a' print wider spaced because the letters have a their own default cardinal spacing and do not have a slanted spacing that would make them 'scooch' together better. This has been no biggie for me, I have much more serious things to deal with on a survey drawing. I use at least 20 fonts on a drawing so that way it cannot be readily seen and looks nicer for the client.