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How do you adjust kerning in Designer?


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Hi all.

I searched the Designer help for "kerning" and got zero hits. So that's the first major problem.

I selected a line of text, and examined the Character properties panel. In the kerning drop-down, everything except "Auto" and 0 was greyed out.

I also noticed the "Character" and "Paragraph" buttons in the toolbar. Clicking on them didn't appear to change the type of text I was defining. So why are they there?

In other vector programs, selecting text with the node-selection tool lets you adjust kerning by dragging a control point on each character. Not in Designer.

So is this functionality just missing?

Thanks for any insight.

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1 minute ago, Stokestack said:

I selected a line of text

Kerning refers to the spacing between pairs of characters. If you want to adjust the spacing of a line of text, you need to change the tracking value rather than the kerning value.

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Sorry, I wasn’t trying to “teach you to suck eggs”! Had it not been for the fact that you referred to “a line of text” I wouldn’t have had any reason to infer that you didn’t know the difference.

Try placing the text cursor between the pair of characters whose kerning you’re trying to adjust.

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Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for Windows • Windows 10 Home/Pro
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Sounds like you are referring to CorelDraw. In any case, using the node tool with a line of text text selecting, then selecting one or more characters with the node tool and moving them in CD is neither tracking nor kerning (both of which are also available in CD). It's just moving characters.

As Alfred mentions, place the cursor between a letter pair, us the keyboard controls for kerning, enter a value or use the spin controls to adjust the kerning in AD.

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12 minutes ago, Stokestack said:

Hi all.

 "kerning" 

If you open the Character panel, put the cursor between two characters and you can adjust the kerning.

You can drag on the  V/A bit, hover over the text value and turn the mouse wheel, or type in a value.

 

kern.jpg.1d7e13362b43dfad7425b9f9c3e56247.jpg

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5 hours ago, Stokestack said:

Too bad it's undocumented.

https://affinity.help/designer/en-US.lproj/pages/Panels/characterPanel.html

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It does in the online version of the Affinity Designer help topics:

832838814_ADhelp.thumb.png.e833eff0834a73926f3a91cff088d80c.png

and in the Affinity Photo version as well:

1107370657_ADhelp.png.5052674495703b20e21cd99f67939adf.png

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Help does help on Mac, I just typed in Kerning and it came up with a list of choices one being the Character panel, I would expect Help to find Kerning under the Character Panel, going to that link displays Kerning under the Positioning and Transform Heading (see Image Below). Having said that, it would have been nice to also have a direct link to the Kerning information, so a link to the Kerning info on the Character Panel would be displayed first and then the more general Character Panel link being the second link.

So, Help displays: 

  1. Kerning - Character Panel
  2. Character Panel
  3. Other choices blah! blah!

745571905_ScreenShot2018-06-27at06_53_03.thumb.png.2d39cca7ca5b487223cfdee7d095fcff.png

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12 hours ago, toltec said:

If you open the Character panel, put the cursor between two characters and you can adjust the kerning.

You can drag on the  V/A bit, hover over the text value and turn the mouse wheel, or type in a value.

 

kern.jpg.1d7e13362b43dfad7425b9f9c3e56247.jpg

Anyway, is like in every other design software I can remember off, it doesn't handle kerning dramatically different to usual UIs, old ones and newer ones.... or do you think it does (to the OP,. not u, toltec ;)   )

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51 minutes ago, firstdefence said:

Help does help on Mac, I just typed in Kerning and it came up with a list of choices one being the Character panel ...

Weird. On my Mac I got nothing for a few seconds, then I got this:

1099297627_kerningsearch.png.0f43b32788c6ca87f83eaa82123057f0.png

The Paragraph panel help does have a "See also" link to the Character panel one, but I would expect the latter to come up in the search instead of the former.

1 hour ago, firstdefence said:

it would have been nice to also have a direct link to the Kerning information ...

As I understand it, the indexing that powers the Mac 'help book' search function is a semi-automated process (in part described in this out-of-date Apple Developer document) that does provide for direct links like that, but only at the help topic level -- IOW, there would have to be a specific Kerning Information help topic separate from the Character panel one for it to come up in the search results. Adding HTML anchor elements to help page HTML code allow scrolling to specific parts of a help topics when it is opened, but that isn't quite the same thing.

Obviously, adding individual help pages for everything like this a user might search for (& in every supported language) is impractical -- the AffinityDesigner.help bundle in the app's resources folder would not only become huge, it would take even longer for searches to complete & a ridiculous number of man-hours to build all those pages.

This is why I like using the online help instead. Because it is powered by the Google custom search engine, all the heavy lifting & advanced algorithmic stuff like synonym searches & page ranking is done remotely on Google's massive computing network, so not only are search results better they also typically complete in fractions of a second without using any of the local computer's comparatively meager resources to do so.

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This is how I got my info on Kerning.

281618758_ScreenShot2018-06-27at09_41_32.png.ef344ca7f23e7bf6cb8f1f0e4785dd1e.png

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47 minutes ago, firstdefence said:

This is how I got my info on Kerning.

Well, this is getting even weirder. When I first tried entering "Kerning" in the Help menu Search filed, I got "No Results Found." Now, not ten minutes after doing that again, I get exactly the same results you did.

I wonder if this has anything to do with cacheing or the OS checking for updated help topics on the web. Many years ago the help feature in the Classic Mac OS often stalled for several minutes before showing anything when my PowerBook did not have a connection to the internet. These days, I sometimes see something similar with the current OS, but it is usually only a delay of a few seconds.

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6 minutes ago, Stokestack said:

The Mac OS help system is pretty pathetic ...

That is why I suggest using the online Affinity help instead.

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1 hour ago, Stokestack said:

That's not very helpful on the plane.

As per my example, I disconnected the Internet (Simulating being on a Plane) I typed in Kerning and got the same list as I show in my earlier screenshot, I Clicked on Character Panel and got the Kerning Info.

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