tracking or kerning in MinionPro

[Marco]

I like to use for my academic work the opentype font MinionPro, that includes polytonic Greek.

However, I find that the tracking (or kerning: I appreciate explanations) for the apostrophe followed by an "a" is weird.
Of course I am using the true apostrophe, not the mark for feet or minutes: not 5'20".

This might well be because MinionPro is written with Englis in mind, and in English you use apostrophe within a Saxon genitive, where no "a" follows the apostrophe: you will have: "Harry’s book".

The problem is with Italian, that writes: "dell’amico". The apostrophe is here too close to the following "a". The weird thing is that this doesn't happen with another font in Mellel. It seems that the behaviour of MinionPro is the same in TextEdit.

I am sending the same message to the mailing list, and I will attach there a few sample images of "dell’amico" and "un’aquila".

Any suggestion about a workaround?

Marco

[nicka]

You could try inserting a narrow space after the apostrophe.

[Marco]

I will do it as you suggest.

However, I would like to understand whether the problem is a missing kerning pair, or something else.

Marco

[rpcameron]

Actually, the characters you are looking for are not created with an apostrophe, but with another Unicode character. Minion Pro includes the precomposed "Greek Capital Letter Alpha with Psili" at U+1F08 and "Greek Small Letter Alpha with Psili" at U+1F00.

Other characters that may be of use are "Greek Psili" at U+1FBF, "Combining Comma Above" at U+0313, "Combing Greek Koronis" at U+0343 and "Greek Koronis" at U+1FBD.

In my installation of Minion Pro, I have all of these characters in the font, so you ought to as well.

[Marco]

Thank you for your informed suggestion.

I am afraid that I did not make myself clear, partly because I don't know how to post an image to the forum.

Greek is ok for me.

My problem is with the apostrophe in the Latin section of the font. In Italian I need the apostrophe for some words, and it is often followed by an a.

Marco

[Mart°n]

The apostrophe looks exactly the same in Mellel and Adobe InDesign CS2 so I think the small space between the apostrophe and the following letter is intended by the font designer (the space isn’t much wider with Adobe Garamond Pro).
The Adobe documentation (available at Adobe’s website - the “Package Readme PDF”) does use Minion and also uses one apostrophe with the same space. While it may look too narrow if you look at it exclusively, I think it doesn’t concern the overall readability but that may depend on your language (I’m not familiar with Italian typography rules).
So it doesn’t seem to be a bug but a peculiarity of this font. As Mellel doesn’t support manual kerning/tracking, the already mentioned option to insert narrow or hair-spaces seems to be the only solution if you like to enlarge that space. You could do that with Mellels sophisticated Find & Replace in a single step if you’ve finished your document.

[Marco]

Thank you very much for your explanation. This is exactly what I needed to know.

Ideally, much of my work would go to an editor that uses InDesign, so that your description is very useful to me.

I guess that the thin space is the solution for works that I need to make ready with Mellel alone. When I know that InDesign comes later, I will drop a note to the editor so that he can add a wider tracking.

[jannuss]

I guess that the thin space is the solution for works that I need to make ready with Mellel alone.

A much less learned version of this issue was raised on the Redlers email group.

To repeat what I wrote there: using a thin space can create positioning problems . A better choice is the Narrow No-Break Space.

Janet

[Marco]

Thank you, Janet, for posting yout tip to the forum, too.

Actually, the narrow non-separation space is a bit too wide for my taste. But I will have to do with that.

[nicka]

Actually, the narrow non-separation space is a bit too wide for my taste.

You could reduce the size of the font, just for that character. A workaround for a workaround.

[Marco]

Thank you, I think this will do.