I am not exactly sure if this is much of an Inkscape question but I will at least try:

Forgive me for my stupidity but I am new to Inkscape and am still trying to get the hang of things. I am trying to design a font using Inkscape/fontforge but have run into a little bit of an issue. Once I generate the font, the spaces between the letters are too large. I know under SVG Font Editor there is an option for kerning between any selected pair of letters but is there a way to adjust it in Inkscape such that the kerning between every letter is smaller?

When I generated the font through fontforge and installed the font, there was too much space between the letters when I tested the words. I'm not exactly sure I can adjust the overall kerning in Inkscape but I thought it might be worth a shot to try it out here. It might just be that I can adjust some settings in fontforge to fix the overall kerning (if anybody knows that this is possible any help would definitely be appreciated.) I know Inkscape gives me the option to fix the kerning between two letters specifically but I don't really want to go through 2704+ pairs of letters; I don't have that much time. Any help would be appreciated.

If I seemed repetitive I apologize in advance. It is my first time writing in a forum like this.

Also, I am running on Suse 11.4

Newbie here. Bumping this back up because I'm having the same issue.

Searches on kerning bring up editing the kerning of specific pairs and lines of text for graphic design and aesthetic value. I've seen no mention of how to fix the initial kerning of a font in general, except for unanswered questions such as this. Even font creation tutorials don't really help, as they usually feature a dingbat format and they fail to address the subtle finesse that a traditional font may require.

Maybe this is something you do outside of Inkscape? I've never created my own font before, so I honestly have no idea how to fix this seemingly simple problem. Free font editors that I've been trying are no help because kerning is only available on the premium versions.

Is this an impossible task? There has to be an easy fix for this sort of thing. Any help is appreciated.

Inkscape lets you adjust the spacing between characters, the spacing between words, and the kerning between individual pairs of characters, for each individual text object.

Double-click on a text object, so that you can see the text tool's control bar at the top of the screen. The controls you want are towards the right of the bar - if your window is too narrow you won't see them, but can still get to them via the drop-down arrow at the end of the toolbar.

See Parts 10 & 11 (particularly the latter) of my tutorial series for more details: viewtopic.php?f=6&t=11981

Thanks for getting back, Xav.
However, I don't believe the text tool has much to do with my problem
My intention was to create a font that is useable outside of inkscape. And I cannot do so as it is right now, with the terrible kerning and all.

It's quite possible that I've gone about this font creation thing in the wrong way. *Sigh.....*

I don't recall seeing any tutorials on creating new SVG fonts. But there may be some out there. Maybe tutorials will explain what you need to do?

elmobites wrote:Thanks for getting back, Xav.
However, I don't believe the text tool has much to do with my problem
My intention was to create a font that is useable outside of inkscape. And I cannot do so as it is right now, with the terrible kerning and all.

It's quite possible that I've gone about this font creation thing in the wrong way. *Sigh.....*

Ah, sorry, I misunderstood the question.

Personally I wouldn't go near SVG fonts these days. They were a great idea that never gained traction for various reasons - including the fact that Inkscape itself can create them but not use them! There's some standardisation effort going into "SVG in OpenType", but to me that misses the main benefit of SVG fonts, so you may as well avoid SVG entirely and go straight for OTF or TTF via a different tool than Inkscape.

Anyway, to your actual question, have you read this: http://designwithfontforge.com/en-US/index.html

It covers a bit on spacing and kerning, and arguably FontForge is a much better tool for creating fonts for use outside Inkscape. You can use it to export an SVG font if you really want one. I haven't actually got as far as creating a font of my own yet, so I can't tell you much more about the process.