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How do you adjust kerning in Designer?


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Kerning is a basic feature and works in AD like in any other graphics software: place cursor between letters and press alt-arrow left/right. You can also do local tracking by selecting a range of letters and alt-arrow.

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Thanks for the responses, guys. But this contradicts earlier feedback, which indicates that you can do it with the dialog that I've captured above.

Also, other software (Corel Draw, for example) uses the node-selection tool to let you space individual characters. So Designer does not work like "any other" graphics software.

Placing the cursor between characters and using Alt does work, but it appears to fail when you hold the keys to repeat. Only after you release the keys do the characters suddenly jump to a new location.

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Hi Stokestack,
The kerning controls in the Character panel only work if you place the cursor between characters in the text objects - in your clip the whole text object is selected thus the controls are unavailable. Tracking controls lets you adjust the text directly with the controls in the Character pane with the /whole) text object selected.

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5 hours ago, Stokestack said:

Thanks for the responses, guys. But this contradicts earlier feedback, which indicates that you can do it with the dialog that I've captured above.

Also, other software (Corel Draw, for example) uses the node-selection tool to let you space individual characters. So Designer does not work like "any other" graphics software.

Placing the cursor between characters and using Alt does work, but it appears to fail when you hold the keys to repeat. Only after you release the keys do the characters suddenly jump to a new location.

I would say that Affinity software does have kerning/tracking like other software but that CD simply has an additional means for moving one or more characters via the nodes, and always has for that matter. CD had this capability of moving character(s) via the nodes before it actually had the ability to kern and track characters. But moving one or more characters via nodes is not kerning or tracking.

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6 hours ago, Stokestack said:

Placing the cursor between characters and using Alt does work, but it appears to fail when you hold the keys to repeat. Only after you release the keys do the characters suddenly jump to a new location.

On my Windows system Alt left or right arrows does manually kern in real time. The text curser needs to be either blinking or have text selected.

Windows 10 Pro, I5 3.3G PC 16G RAM

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Thanks for the replies. On the Mac, if you press and hold Alt-arrow to space your characters, there is no visible result until you release the keys and the letters suddenly pop to a new location.

Another bug is that the spacing control (the one that would have spread all the characters out) doesn't work if the current tool is the Text tool. If the current tool is the selection (arrow) tool, it works.

Side note: Why is there no way to delete this giant empty video frame?

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Hi Stokestack,
1. I'm still unable to recreate this on my system. Pressing and holding ⌥ (option/alt) + ← → (cursor keys) does have a visible effect on screen no matter if i hold the cursor key or not. There must be something else (os setting or third app interfering) here.

hold_cursor_keys.thumb.gif.fae6e7da8a803ef39ff404e57079f0b3.gif

2. The tracking (spacing control) doesn't work in your clip with the text tool selected because you have to select some characters, words or sentences first. Resuming with the Move Tool the whole text block is selected and tracking is applied to all text equally. With the Text tools selected  - note the cursor inside the text frame) - you have to explicitly select the bit of text you want to apply the Tracking to.

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Thanks for the reply.

 

10 hours ago, MEB said:

2. The tracking (spacing control) doesn't work in your clip with the text tool selected because you have to select some characters, words or sentences first. Resuming with the Move Tool the whole text block is selected and tracking is applied to all text equally. With the Text tools selected  - note the cursor inside the text frame) - you have to explicitly select the bit of text you want to apply the Tracking to.

Hm, this does not appear to be true. Please see attached screen grab.

The bug appears to be that the tracking control doesn't work when the text tool is active but you haven't re-clicked on the text object. The tracking control doesn't require text to be selected (nor should it), so there's no reason it shouldn't work at all times when a text object is selected (regardless of the active tool).

 

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  • 1 year later...
  • 3 weeks later...

Thank you Toltec, until I read your post I too was having issues with the "kerning" option. Now all is well and I can go on with my life, happily. Thanks again, however it would have been nice if this step-by-step process had been provided in the Affinity Design help guide, or as "MEB" offered a keyboard shortcut (control + arrow keys).

Problem solved!

 

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  • 3 months later...

Hi all,

Using "alt" together with "Left" or "Right arrow keys, change the kerning when placing the text cursor between letter pairs. When you use "alt" together with "shift" and the "Left" or "Right" arrow keys, you almost double the kerning.

You can do the same for the "Leading" with the "alt" and "Left" or "Right" arrow key together.

Raise the question, that kerning is not better done in the font itself? Imagine you do not need to kern only one pair but that there are several occasions in your document. Maybe a feature request for kerning tables inside Designer itself where we can set kerning for pairs used over the whole document would be an interesting request.

Chris

 

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6 minutes ago, Bad_Wolf said:

Maybe a feature request for kerning tables inside Designer itself where we can set kerning for pairs used over the whole document would be an interesting request

This is something I’ve always been a fan of. That would be awesome, as there are still quite a few fonts with occasional bad kerning pairs around. 😣

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42 minutes ago, A_B_C said:

This is something I’ve always been a fan of. That would be awesome, as there are still quite a few fonts with occasional bad kerning pairs around. 😣

Unfortunately, some fonts have many thousands of kerning pairs. I don’t think it would be reasonable to expect to be able to deal with such fonts effectively outside of a dedicated font editor.

Alfred spacer.png
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for Windows • Windows 10 Home/Pro
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for iPad • iPadOS 17.4.1 (iPad 7th gen)

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To make my point clearer imaging there are hundreds of instances of the word "We" and lets assume the kerning has to be changed for all these words. When we can setup an application wide table with adjusted kerning values for a particular pair in the font, overtime this will result in a nice kerning table which Designer (or the other Affinity programs) can use to automaticly adjust the kerning.

I agree that this preferably should be done in the font itself. However, when that is not possible, correcting in the Affinity suite should be excellent.

Chris

 

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1 hour ago, Alfred said:

Unfortunately, some fonts have many thousands of kerning pairs. I don’t think it would be reasonable to expect to be able to deal with such fonts effectively outside of a dedicated font editor.

Unfortunately, not many commercial font licences allow for modification. Adobe desktop fonts are an exception to this.

However, with Typekit (the former name), SkyFonts and other cloud font services modification and use isn't even possible (in the long term anyway). Usage of application kerning tables has been in QXP, well, forever. Like the example Chris gave, it isn't like 10k pairs are going to be overridden. Even the best font authors may make decisions that seem odd compared to other font pairings in the same font.

That said, one may be surprised at how few Q users even know they can make kern pair adjustments these days. I mainly see it when obtaining books from publishers that have begun in Q, or are to be specifically done in Q and the publisher has a house style and these pairings have already been made.

Currently, in say ID, people have either blindly accepted poor kern pairings or have made character styles with kern settings and used GREP f/r to apply said c.style--unless Optical kern takes care of it (something APub/QXP, etc. do not have) but Optical kern may make such things worse. It's a pita to do semi-manually.

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4 minutes ago, MikeW said:

Currently, in say ID, people have either blindly accepted poor kern pairings or have made character styles with kern settings and used GREP f/r to apply said c.style

That approach should also work on Publisher, shouldn't it? But not in Designer, of course, as it doesn't have Find/Replace.

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
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1 hour ago, Alfred said:

Unfortunately, some fonts have many thousands of kerning pairs. I don’t think it would be reasonable to expect to be able to deal with such fonts effectively outside of a dedicated font editor.

QXP manage this… Oups, @MikeW was faster !

And it's able to save the result as XML files (if I remember correctly), so you can keep them and use them on another computer.

It can be handy in French when there's too much space between apostrophe/right single quote and the next character, for example.

QXP10_Precision_CustomKerning.png.beeeb295ec96fcab1cb3f88db495f5d2.png

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3 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

That approach should also work on Publisher, shouldn't it? But not in Designer, of course, as it doesn't have Find/Replace.

Of course...I just wanted to throw a subtle jab in at Serif for the optical kern feature request too. Optical kern as in ID can, often does, mitigate unsightly kern pairings--even if I do seldom use it.

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