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In FontLab 8 terms, the space to the left and right of each glyph is its “sidebearings” (figure 2). You can adjust these by dragging the lines in the Metrics window. But you don’t have to set each one individually. FontLab 8 lets you set up “metrics keys” to ensure the that similar glyphs have the same sidebearings. In a Latin font, start by spacing the “control characters”: ‘n’ and ‘o’ for lowercase, ‘H’ and ‘O’ for uppercase. Get these to feel just right in pseudo-words like ‘nnonoo’ and ‘HHOHOO’. Then link other glyphs to these — for each side separately. The left side of the ‘b’ glyph is flat like ‘n’ but its right side is round like ‘o’. So you can put ‘n’ as the left sidebearing of ‘b’, ‘h’, ‘i’, ‘j’, ‘k’, ‘l’, ‘m’, ‘p’, ‘r’, and put ‘o’ as the left sidebearing of ‘c’, ‘d’, ‘e’, ‘q’ (figure 3). Then put ‘o’ as the right sidebearing of ‘b’, ‘p’, and so on. Test words and sentences in the Metrics window: are some letter pairs colliding while others gape? Tweak the control characters spacing, and independently space the glyphs that don’t look like any others (‘a’, ‘g’, ‘s’, ‘t’, ‘z’). Give reader-friendly “personal space” around the letters for as many letter combinations as you can. Some combos will still stand out, but every two letters instantly make great neighbours. Think of the classic ‘VA’ pair — that big wedge-shaped space looks odd, as if they’re holding each other at arms’ length after an argument. This is where kerning comes in: custom-tweaking the space for specific pairs to even out these awkward gaps.