Kerning Type - hiding edges and boxes

[DGee]

Hi Everyone, I'm struggling while kerning type in Designer and I have a couple of questions:

1. Is there a shortcut in Designer to increase/decrease Kerning by 1%?

2. Is there a way to hide the text box and the pulsating vertical line while kerning? This is really distracting....

Thanks,

D

 

[firstdefence]

45 minutes ago, DGee said:

1. Is there a shortcut in Designer to increase/decrease Kerning by 1%?

Yes just click in the input box and use the up and down arrows on the keyboard and it will increase or decrease the kerning by 1% increments. 

45 minutes ago, DGee said:

2. Is there a way to hide the text box and the pulsating vertical line while kerning? This is really distracting.

Not that I'm aware of.

[lacerto]

There is also an inbuilt shortcut key, Alt/Opt + Left/Right Arrow, which decreases or increases kerning by  thousands of an em (‰), or if you hold down the Shift key while pressing, in hundreds of an em (%). You can determine the shortcut via Preferences / Shortcuts / Text / Spacing > Tighten/Loosen and Tighten More > Loosen More. The operations are also available as menu commands under Text > Spacing. The feature is available across all three Affinity apps.

I do not think hiding extras includes the blinking bar in anywhere else than in Photoshop.

[lepr]

7 hours ago, lacerto said:

decreases or increases kerning

adjusts tracking, not kerning

[lacerto]

3 hours ago, ,,, said:

adjusts tracking, not kerning

I had a vague feeling (and may well be wrong) that it used to adjust (absurdly) tracking at some point, but it really does adjust kerning (spacing between pair of glyphs, not something that can be applied to characters / text selections themselves, like tracking). Anyway, this is how it now works at least in all desktop versions (1.10.6, 2.0.4 and v2 beta) and all three apps, including the Spacing menu commands.

But I made a mistake: on macOS, the default shortcut for hundreds of em is not Opt+Shift but Opt+Cmd. It is just that I have changed this to Opt+Shift because this is how it is on Windows, and I want to have identical shortcuts on both systems.

[Old Bruce]

3 hours ago, ,,, said:

adjusts tracking, not kerning

 

10 hours ago, lacerto said:

which decreases or increases kerning

Kerning and Tracking. It just depends on whether or not you have the Text Caret between two Characters for the former and if you have a selection of several characters made then the latter is changed.

[lepr]

2 minutes ago, Old Bruce said:

 

Kerning and Tracking. It just depends on whether or not you have the Text Caret between two Characters for the former and if you have a selection of several characters made then the latter is changed.

Was in the middle of typing a similar reply after just discovering that a moment ago.

[lacerto]

Good to know. In this topic OP was however talking specifically about kerning, and kerning can only be adjusted by placing the text cursor between two glyphs. Otherwise you would not have the blinking cursor, either...

[DGee]

15 hours ago, lacerto said:

There is also an inbuilt shortcut key, Alt/Opt + Left/Right Arrow, which decreases or increases kerning by  thousands of an em (‰), or if you hold down the Shift key while pressing, in hundreds of an em (%). You can determine the shortcut via Preferences / Shortcuts / Text / Spacing > Tighten/Loosen and Tighten More > Loosen More. The operations are also available as menu commands under Text > Spacing. The feature is available across all three Affinity apps.

I do not think hiding extras includes the blinking bar in anywhere else than in Photoshop.

Thanks, yes I'm already using those shortcuts. They are useful only to do a rough kerning in a few seconds but after that you need to be precise and there are no available shortcuts to go below 10% increments which is when things get trickier, yes you can use the slider in the character panel afterwards but it's not the same.

You can hide all text overlays in Illustrator and Photoshop. In vectorstyler the box hides automatically, and the cursor line is less obtrusive, in Pixelmator you can hide the text overlays except for the cursor which it's also less obtrusive.

It should be extremely easy to implement that function and the benefits are very real. I mean in my experience, as much as I love designer, kerning and working with type in affinity designer is a pain for the constant distraction of the overlays. Kerning is already very hard but when you have those extra distractions it becomes a pain. The cursor line should hide automatically when performing changes, that would be optimal. 

[lacerto]

1 hour ago, DGee said:

They are useful only to do a rough kerning in a few seconds but after that you need to be precise and there are no available shortcuts to go below 10% increments which is when things get trickier

Thanks, I seem to have been dreaming when testing this. I thought that I saw this working as mentioned, 1/1000 of a change with left/right arrow, and 1/100 when holding down the modifier. But it is 10 and 50.