Kerning for lyrics with apostrophes

Dorico
#1

When entering lyrics, I’ve noticed that words with apostrophes within a single syllable (like “He’d” or “o’er”) result in very tight kerning. The apostrophe seems to get almost no space, and the syllable looks cramped - almost like a typo. Finale has always given me the same result.

By contrast, MS Word adds a slight padding for the apostrophe, which looks a lot more pleasing.

Any chance the apostrophe could be given a little more wiggle room?

Thanks,
Dan

Edit: this happens with Minion Pro, which is my preferred lyric font. But Academico looks much better. Hmm, built-in padding for apostrophes could present a problem, since different fonts seem to give different results. Or maybe it’s entirely within the font, and there’s no way to address it.

#2

FWIW there are some unicodes codes for very small hard spaces (U+200A)
Here are some useful codes : http://jkorpela.fi/chars/spaces.html

#3

Marc, this is exactly what I need. Thanks!!

Probably a dumb question, but… how do I enter these unicode characters? I can’t seem to manage it. I’ve used alt-0252 and such, but these don’t seem to work as expected.

#4

Since you’re on windows I cannot help you but a simple search in your browser should show you :wink:

#5

I did search carefully before asking… sorry. Still not sure. Lots of search results, but nothing makes sense to me. Hopefully someone here on Windows may be able to help.

#6

Dan,

Call up the Character Map utility on W10. Click Advanced View tickbox at the bottom. You can then enter a Unicode codepoint.

#7

Thanks Craig!

#8

Dan,

apostrophes within a single syllable (like “He’d” or “o’er”)

instead of using the inch/typewriter apostrophes ’
why not use the ’ ?
to my eye they look more correct, but I might be mistaken…

He’d > He’d

o’er > o’er

Do they give you better spacing in the lyrics line?

#9

My experience is that Dorico does curly speech marks and apostrophes by default, instead of the straight versions, for which I am eternally grateful.

I suspect the issue may be down the font kerning. I haven’t noticed any issue with the fonts I use.

#10

I agree with Ben that it is probably an issue within the font. On the other hand, Minion is a highly professional (and costly) font family and I doubt that MS Word adds space on its own… Maybe Dorico can’t read out some of its kerning data?

#11

After a quick test, I’d say that MS Word uses slightly too much space for the apostrophe, but it seems to be a more pleasing result than the slightly too squished setting found in InDesign, Pages and Dorico.

Other fonts give different results.

I’d say it’s probably a combination of the font metrics and how a particular type engine renders them. It’s possible that Dorico doesn’t have that much choice in the way that Qt sets type.

#12

The “6 per em space” should be

Alt 2006

according to https://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2006/index.htm

Does that work?

#13

Kerning is font-specific. Only curly apostrophes and quotes are typographically correct.
A very useful font tool for Windows users is Babelmap, available at http://www.babelstone.co.uk/Software/BabelMap.html
It is free (though donations are welcome). You can copy characters (or strings) in Babelmap and paste them into any other application.