automatic kerning before punctuation marks

[Gaunilo]

Hello everyone,

today I have a very special problem. I need to add a bit more flesh before punctuation marks, notably ! and ?. They should be offset a bit more from the text than they usually are.

Now in a book it is a bit difficult to do everyone by hand.

I was unable to find an automatic kerning for this. Is there a way?
If not, it would be great to add the possibility to fix a certain kerning with a certain letter. 

i. e. + 30% before all ? and + 20 % before all !

 

Hopefully someone can help me out.

Thanks a lot!

H. 

[Alfred]

28 minutes ago, Gaunilo said:

I need to add a bit more flesh before punctuation marks, notably ! and ?. They should be offset a bit more from the text than they usually are.

Instead of trying to use kerning to achieve this you should do it by using a suitable Unicode space character: U+2008 PUNCTUATION SPACE or U+2009 THIN SPACE. The punctuation space is defined to be the same width as a period; the width of the thin space is slightly smaller.

[Gaunilo]

7 hours ago, Alfred said:

Instead of trying to use kerning to achieve this you should do it by using a suitable Unicode space character: U+2008 PUNCTUATION SPACE or U+2009 THIN SPACE. The punctuation space is defined to be the same width as a period; the width of the thin space is slightly smaller.

Thanks, and how do I use this in a whole book? 
Search and exchange? I usually find this rather… untrustworthy.

 

[Alfred]

6 minutes ago, Gaunilo said:

how do I use this in a whole book?

It shouldn’t be difficult, but I’ll leave it to someone else to come up with a reliable method!

[Pšenda]

8 hours ago, Alfred said:

space character

Then cannot be torn word and "?!" for automatic hyphenation or alignment? Are these gaps perceived as fixed - inseparable?

[Alfred]

1 hour ago, Pšenda said:

Are these gaps perceived as fixed - inseparable?

My understanding is that they are both what is usually called ‘non-breaking’. So they would indeed be inseparable from the characters on either side.

[thomaso]

4 hours ago, Gaunilo said:

Thanks, and how do I use this in a whole book? 
Search and exchange? I usually find this rather… untrustworthy.

Yes, you can use Find & Replace for this. You can try it first in a small document until you know how it works and you trust it.

1. Make sure to set F&R to "Normal" mode (not "Regular Expressions") via the cog icon above the Find field.
2. Then type in the Find field for instance a . followed by a space (to avoid changing numbers as in "0.5"). Instead typing you also can copy/paste it from a text frame.
3. Prepare the "Replace" result in a text frame: From the menu Text > Insert > Spaces choose one of your choice (e.g. a "Sixths" space) to paste it at one spot in your text.
4. Copy this part "sixth-space . space" and place it in the Replace field.
5. Press Find
6. Press Replace
7. Press Replace All

With "Regular Expressions" there is even a more flexible way which allows to change different punctuation marks in one go. This "Regex" (or ~ "GREP") requires certain syntax and is more complex, especially since some punctuation marks are rather commands and need to be 'wrapped' to be treated as text characters.
https://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_72_0/libs/regex/doc/html/boost_regex/syntax/perl_syntax.html

 

[lacerto]

(...)

[kenmcd]

On 8/9/2020 at 1:34 AM, Gaunilo said:

i. e. + 30% before all ? and + 20 % before all !

That spacing is a decision by the font designer.
You may be able to simply fix the font.
If it can be modified ...
Just increase the left side bearing on those characters.
 

[Alfred]

29 minutes ago, LibreTraining said:

That spacing is a decision by the font designer.

The OP isn’t talking about side bearings. What’s under discussion here is typographical conventions in languages such as French, where punctuation such as exclamation marks and guillemets should have thin spaces separating them from preceding or enclosed characters.

[walt.farrell]

17 minutes ago, Alfred said:

The OP isn’t talking about side bearings. What’s under discussion here is typographical conventions in languages such as French, where punctuation such as exclamation marks and guillemets should have thin spaces separating them from preceding or enclosed characters.

For some reason I thought that was handled automatically by Publisher based on the spelling language settings.

[lacerto]

(...)

[MikeW]

Conventions like this where thin space (or other space) before punctuation shouldn't happen at either the application nor font level. It can/will cause more problems than it solves.

[lacerto]

(...)

[kenmcd]

2 hours ago, Alfred said:

The OP isn’t talking about side bearings. What’s under discussion here is typographical conventions in languages such as French, where punctuation such as exclamation marks and guillemets should have thin spaces separating them from preceding or enclosed characters.

I am familiar with the thin spaces used in French for guillemots, etc.
But, I did not see any mention of a language in the original post, only a spacing issue (kerning).
Some fonts have very poor spacing settings for punctuation, and even across the entire font.

Until the original poster clarifies the actual issue ...
we do not know if it is a language related spaces issue, or a font related character spacing issue.
What is the language being used?
Is it a language which normally uses the "thin space" type spacing around punctuation?
What is the font being used?
Is the font some poorly made junk font, or a quality font?

It appears some of us made the assumption it was a language thin space issue,
just like I made the assumption is a character spacing issue.

@Gaunilo
Please clarify.

[Alfred]

26 minutes ago, LibreTraining said:

It appears some of us made the assumption it was a language thin space issue,
just like I made the assumption is a character spacing issue.

The reason why I made that assumption about thin spaces is that the OP said:

On 8/9/2020 at 9:34 AM, Gaunilo said:

I need to add a bit more flesh before punctuation marks, notably ! and ?. They should be offset a bit more from the text than they usually are.

That came across as a general comment, not tied to any particular font, but no doubt @Gaunilo will be able to provide clarification.

[Gaunilo]

Sorry to have dropped out. It was actually a question of readability as well as typography that is considered correct in German speaking countries. 

It is not an issue any more. Due to a change of font, the problem solved itself. I guess the font used was badly spaced/kerned.

Thanks a lot and sorry for the silence on my part.