Re: [ft-devel] is it possible to retrieve whole kerning table?

[Piotr Pawłow]

On Tuesday 17 January 2006 01:25, Werner LEMBERG wrote:
> > It would be nice, though, if freetype had some kind of higher level
> > interface to the kerning tables, so that other font formats than
> > TrueType could be supported as well.
> This won't happen.  Please remember that modern OpenType fonts don't
> have a `kern' table but a `kern' feature in the `GPOS' table.

But I guess a truetype kern table is just a special case of GPOS, namely a 
GPOS pair-adjustment table. That's what I had in mind, to make a more general 
interface to kerning tables, in order to...

> pairs but on glyph strings.  With other words, you need a layout
> engine which can handle OpenType.  Use Pango, Qt, or ICU.

...reduce the number of special cases all the higher level libraries need to 
handle.

On the other hand, I do not know much about kerning and typography in general, 
so maybe that is not a good idea after all :)  Just a thought.