[electric_angel]

does anyone find gill a pain to kern? i use quark xpress and body copy set in gill can look terrible with h&js that work great with most other faces. there seem to be lots of problems with various letter combinations and don't even get me started on space after full stops.

i've started created my own kerning table for it but still not happy with the results yet. i'd love to see anybody elses attempts.

[centro]

.

[Mandy Moo]

I just think it's bad messing around with kerning, things starts getting messy. Centro's example is great but that is if you don't mind widowing. At uni they told me never to messing with kernings and widowing is a no no.

[centro]

Originally Posted by Mandy Moo

At uni they told me never to messing with kernings

so you dont mind shit looking type then. Anyway, I used H&J's not kerning in the example.

[electric_angel]

that's quite nice centro, would like to see a para with full stops in though to see how it flows form one sentence to another.

what are your h&j settings?

[electric_angel]

Originally Posted by Mandy Moo

At uni they told me never to messing with kernings and widowing is a no no.

then they told you wrong. kerning is essential if you want nice type.

[centro]

.

[electric_angel]

thanks centro, i'll try those settings out although i suspect capitals 'T's and 'W's are still gonna need a bit of fiddling with at the start of new sentences.

[steveb]

Is Monotype's version of Gill really so fucked that even body type needs kerning? I can understand maybe adjusting large headlines, but any tiny irregularities (and they SHOULD be tiny) should not be noticeable at small point sizes.

[centro]

I think people are getting kerning confused with H&J's. Most body copy needs tightening up with H&J's and sometime a bit of kerning is needed as well.

[John Good]

Did you buy your Gill ? I mean, is it the official one ?

it's one of the most beautiful fonts ever.
Please, don't knock at it before I sleep, it could give me nightmares.

[Herr Kurm]

Originally Posted by centro

Most body copy needs tightening up with H&J's

like -20 HandJ for jenson Pro?

[centro]

possibly

[electric_angel]

Originally Posted by John Good

Did you buy your Gill ? I mean, is it the official one ?

it's one of the most beautiful fonts ever.
Please, don't knock at it before I sleep, it could give me nightmares.

yeah, my copy is kosher. actually i think a couple of the monotypes cuts i bought back in the mid 90's are problematic. maybe they were going through a bad patch or something? garamond in particular is terrible on some letter combinations. in the end i deleted it and bought a different make.

i agree with you on gill sans letterforms - sublime. and caps look stunning with wide spacing (not all sans fonts can claim that) but as a body copy font i think it's pretty quirky and a tricky one to use well. to my eyes it's a font with a lot of 'space' and maybe this causes the problems - tighten it too much and it looks jumbled, space it too far and you end up looking through the text at the paper.

it's probably the only font where clients have commented on the spacing (mostly the space between sentences) on early proofs whilst we're still tweaking kerning for their text - it's all down to the kerning settings that came as standard with the font. usually clients don't notice stuff like that unless you've made a complete pigs ear of it. maybe we had, heh heh.

anyway, i think we're ordering a linotype collection which will include gill so i'll ditch the monotype cut (as much as it pains me cos gill created it for them) and see if the linotype cut is a bit kinder.

thanks for the discussion guys

[electric_angel]

seems i'm not alone... interesting article here:

w w w . typotheque.com/articles/re-evaluation_of_gill_sans/