About LS Cadencer Tools

These two tools are meant for applying auto-spacing to fonts using an underlying grid for calculating the side-bearings. This principle and algorithm find their origin in Frank E. Blokland’s PhD research on the (effects of) systematization, standardization, and unitization in Renaissance font production.

The LS Cadencer tools were developed as Extensions/Plugins for the font editors Robofont and GlyphsApp (V.2).

With these tools the principles of spacing, applied in the production of printing types in the sixteenth century, are transferred to our current digital technology of font design.

LS Cadencer is meant for applying auto-spacing to fonts using a grid. This grid is flexible and dependent on the so called stem-interval. The stem-interval is always measured at the key glyph, either the ‘m’ or the ‘n’ glyph. The grid can be widened or tightend by the user to influence the spacing in general. Predefined spacing tables embedded in this tool allow the user to automatically space a small glyph-set for certain genres of fonts.

LS Cadenculator, the second tool, reverse engineers what LS Cadencer does. The user can provide a folder of existing font files in .otf or .ufo formats. All side-bearings of a given set of glyphs will be measured in these fonts. The basis of these calculations is again the stem-interval of the ‘m’ or the ‘n’ glyph and the grid-steps which can be influence by the user, to either widening or tightening the underlying grid. These calculations can be used as a basis for creating a new spacing table or to extend the existing ones embedded in the auto-spacing tool LS Cadencer. The output can be directly imported and applied with LS Cadencer.

For a more detailed explanation you can watch the screencasts videos below.