How do I fix Kerning now?

[Humbucker]

[walt.farrell]

Kerning (space between letters in a word)? Or Leading (space between lines?)

I think you might mean Leading:

Yours is set to 4pt. It should typically be a bit larger than your font size.

How did you get that text into your document with the leading set that way? It looks like that value of 4pt was set manually.

[Humbucker]

Hi Walt,

For some reason when I cut and pasted this squished text into a Frame Text box, this option was frozen and would not space the lines (not kerning, leading).

I had to manually rewrite the text, then Leading became available, although I don't know wht that is.

 

Secondly, is there any way to resize those tools? They are hard to see on a non-hi-def Mac. Too small.

[Old Bruce]

First gig I had I had to learn how to set type by hand from a bunch of individual lead letters. Make one row of words then put in a thin (0.5, 1 or 2 point thick) strip of lead on the bottom of the row and start the next row of letters. The strip of lead is like the white space in this reply. Kerning was achieved by putting tiny strips of brass between the individual letters, to decrease the space I would have had to shave the letters' width and carve a space in one for the top of the letter form... very complex and this was a paying gig so that never happened.

2 hours ago, Humbucker said:

I had to manually rewrite the text, then Leading became available, although I don't know wht that is.

Your having to rewrite the text makes me think it wasn't "text" but an image of some sort.

The kerning 'seems' okay (others will differ I'm sure) but your leading is negative, meaning the lines are overlapping, you have to increase that.

[Humbucker]

Thanks Bruce. 

So far I'm not a fan of the Paragraph text tool in the new update. These are heavily used tools, but they've them buried inside of unfolding triangle carrots, and super small controls with no way to resize them.

 

 

[R C-R]

6 hours ago, Humbucker said:

So far I'm not a fan of the Paragraph text tool in the new update. These are heavily used tools, but they've them buried inside of unfolding triangle carrots, and super small controls with no way to resize them.

Maybe using some of the following features will make you more of a fan, or at least dislike the implementation a bit less:

• The Paragraph panel can be dragged out of the Studio group if it is in one so it becomes a floating panel window. Its width & height can then be resized in the same way other windows can.
• Like other Studio panels & panel groups, it can be collapsed to just its title bar by double-clicking on that, & expanded by single clicking on the collapsed title bar. This allows users to make it large enough that its various sections can be left expanded but still quickly hide all of its parts when they would otherwise cover too much of the workspace.
• Items like First Line Indent, word & letter spacing, etc. that have little icons next to their numeric fields can be changed by clicking & dragging left or right on these icons, eliminating the need to click into the field & use the keyboard to set values. This works interactively, so you can see the changes as you drag.
• Like other Studio panels, the position & such are 'sticky' so until you change them, they remain as set for each document you open or create.

Granted, the controls are small & none of these things will help with that, but if they were larger they would use much more screen space, limiting how much of your document(s) you could see when using them, so it is always going to be a tradeoff in that respect.

[Humbucker]

Hi RC-R,

Thanks for pointing out the finer features of the Paragraph panel. I see how certain features were made to be handy by dragging which I did not know, although I always wondered why there appeared to be side to side arrows at the bottom of the icons.

 

I do think there needs to be a way to organize and resize the collapsible tool sets, but now I know how to get to them better.

 

Thanks again!