Issues with Adobe Aldine and Adobe Kis in French typesetting
While exploring Aldine and Adobe Kis for French-language typesetting, I noticed a couple of small issues:
After a capital “L”, the kerning of the apostrophe seems overly tight when followed by certain lowercase vowels such as a, e, or o (actually, in some cases, it appears even tighter than if the apostrophe were not present at all). This can cause unfortunate ambiguities in French, where a phrase like “L’aine” might be visually mistaken for “Laine”—two words with very different meanings.
In combinations like “fè”, the ascender of the f tends to collide or nearly touch the è. While tight spacing in “fè” is quite typical in old-style typefaces, the proximity here feels unusually close. In French, this happens often (typically “Je préfère”). In italics, the problem is even more serious, with an outright collision (especially with Adobe Kis).
Find enclosed visual examples of those issues.
Misouri
shared this idea
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Frank Grießhammer
commented
Your note about the combination fè (and fä fï, and other such cases) is also valid, however it is not addressable using purely technical means. In other words, this constitutes a design problem.
Solving this completely would require significant updates to the design of the font (not only the accents, but also the f), which should have been considered by the original designer.
In other words, while this won’t be solved in Kis, thank you for reminding us of those important points to look out for in future designs.
To offer an alternative perspective – overlapping glyphs are not necessarily bad, in my personal opinion, huge gaps of whitespace, introduced to avoid such clashes are worse.
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Frank Grießhammer
commented
Hi @Misouri, this is to let you know that Adobe Kis has been updated to address some of your concerns.
The main issue is that Kis is kerned quite tightly, which means that the corrections made to L’ and ’A are compounding in the combination L’A, which ultimately leads to a crash of L and A.
The new version 1.013 adds a feature which solves all such over-kerned combinations in context (see attached screenshot).
To update your copy of Kis, please remove the family via the CC application, and re-sync it.
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Thank you for reporting this issue. We will take a look and post updates as we work to resolve this.
