🚀 go-pugleaf

Hmm. My answer to B is: "Because we are multilingual, our second language makes extensive use of macron-vowels and these are usually not supported in Western European typefaces".

I have a script, based on bits of the above, which will take a selected pair of characters and map their kerning onto all other instances of that pair (using an intermediary character 'delta' that denotes the second character to have kerning applied, and is removed on a second pass of the search). It works, and you can have a copy if you want one (but it's clunkier than Ole's script).

But... it has the same problem that QuarkXpress's 'kerning table edit' function has, and that is that the second character of the pair and the next character end up kerned together as well as a natural by-product of the typeface metrics. The values I'm using for kerning the macron over the vowel are like -400 1000/em, this is not being applied to the macron-following pair - they have normal kerning values but the macron isn't a full em wide and the shortfall pulls in the next character. Even if the macron was a full em wide, or if the script was extended to add the shortfall to the next pair, it would fall over on w and i and any other characters with odd sizes.

At least in QuarkXpress the kerning table is applied to the whole font, and it is relatively trivial to set up macron-anything pairs as it is a one-time process (and because Maori only uses 10 consonants so there are relatively few pairs to set up).

It is looking like my eventual solution will be to set up kerning values for all the required pairs and codify them into the document (probably as an XML value or pasteboard object that can be retrieved by the script). I'll probably write a multi-part interface that draws out a worksheet for the selected font settings, layers it against an unkerned copy for reference and then embeds a list of the kerning pair values into the document once the user has set up the kerning pairs manually.

It always seems simpler to open Fontographer and kludge up a Maori version of the font which substitutes macron-vowels for the dieresis-vowels though ;)