That way the font would look too tight in any other tool and just right in Shotcut. Now I would go to the FontForge forum and ask there, how to efficiently reduce all the right sidebearings (for the entire font) by x units by way of a batch-job. Then either remove even more or some less units. I propose you start by removing 80 units on each glyph of your sample text and see what that does in SC. You can use a sample text first in Shotcut and then in the FontForge metrics window, guessing and testing by iteration how much you need to remove in sidebearing units. Each glyph has a left side bearing and a right side bearing, in the example … of the lowercase ‘a’ of Open Sans the right sidebearing has a value of 166 units, and the left sidebearing has a value of 94 units. These spaces between glyphs are composed of the ‘side bearings’ from each glyph pair. The space between any two glyph has two components the space after the first glyph, and the space before the second glyph. Metrics Windows can be opened from the ‘Window’ menu, or by using the Control-k command. In FontForge, the Metrics Window allows you to design the metrics of your font, alter the spacing between them, and test how glyphs look together. I quote from the book “Design with FontForge by the FontForge Community” If you get tired of preparing workarounds, like HTML pages or even PNG files with text and transparency, you could consider hacking your font: You would grab another OpenSource tool like FontForge and try to make a copy of your font for Shotcut-use: I would +1 this, as we are working with another “exotic” language in West Africa. In the long run, if we are asking nicely, the SC team might include “advanced text settings” into their roadmap.

I am confident that this forum will find you several solid workarounds for the moment. (In Scribus the option is under Advanced Settings(!) and is called Manual Tracking, other tools are calling it something else.) You would find this in any DTP program, but SC is for video. I looked over the text filter in Shotcut again and did not find what you would need: An option to tweak the horizontal spacing of your characters.

Now with Devnagari fonts, as you have certainly experienced elsewhere, classic rendering engines are still struggling as your fonts are considered somewhat “exotic” from a classic it perspective (where ASCII did not have enough characters for any non-English language)(for example from this need to have your top-linen join each other). Otherwise you would only see the glyph-codes in some default console-font. “Why” in IT is a tricky question, but I will try: You need to realise that any program which is showing text, is using some rendering engine or other.

How to set space in fontforge