Changing Kerning/Tracking Increments
James wrote:
Is there any way to track incrementally? That is, I’d like to be able to input, say for example, ‘2.5’ into the kerning or tracking field. But indesign changes this to ‘3’. Sometimes 3 is too much!
No, I don’t think there’s any way to input fractions of units. In InDesign, each unit is 1/1000th of an em space. So, if you’re in 24-pt text, one unit is .024 pt (about .0003 inches). I think it’s quite unlikely that anyone would ever notice the difference between one unit of kerning/tracking, much less a half unit.
If you’re noticing a difference between 3 and 4 units of tracking, you’re probably zoomed in to something like 4000%, which displays things that won’t necessarily appear in the real world.
In QuarkXPress, each unit of tracking or kerning was 1/200th of an em (5 times bigger than InDesign’s).
By the way, one question I’m often asked is “what are the keyboard shortcuts for kerning and leading?” You can change kerning and tracking by pressing Option/Alt-left or right arrow. You can change leading (for selected characters) by pressing Option/Alt-up or down arrow. (The up arrow decreases leading… it pushes the lines “up.”) If you don’t like the huge 20-unit change in kerning/tracking or the 2-point change in leading, you can change those values in the Units & Increments pane of the Preferences dialog box.
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I usually use the amount of 5 because it is equal it 1 in quark. That way if I hit opt-left 3 times it would be -15 in ID which is the same as -3 in Quark.
When I explain this to people moving from ID to Quark I just tell them to multiple what they want times 5 since ID is 5 times better than Quark.
“If you don?t like the huge 20-unit change in kerning/tracking or the 2-point change in leading, you can change those values in the Units & Increments pane of the Preferences dialog box.”
Best tip of the month so far! :) I strated reading the post and immediately thought of the annoyance of the increments for some values. Even the hundredth of an em of tracking for the box sometimes is too much (sometimes, -1 is enough, but I have to keep trying the values from -10 up in order to find the best fit, and that I’d done mannually up till now). Even if all the preference changes is the keyboard increment, that may be even better than what I originally anticipated, since I can still go 10 thousandths at a time, but now I have (through the keyboard) the option to go 1 thousandth at a time as well.
This is one of the things I used to know and forgot and never bothered enough to find that shortcut again! This is also one of the reasons I came to love this site and now your podcast too. Thank you!
Unfortunately, keyboard increments are a document pref, not application as they should be. (Um, hi Adobe, this is a user interface pref.) Open ID docs from others at your own risk.
I came here looking for that answer Nancy gave. That is Keyboard Increments should be a user setting NOT a document setting. In other words if you open a file that someone else has created or worked on, you receive their settings for your shortcut keyboard increments. A HUGE PAIN IN THE ____. The oldest simplest software would NOT have this problem. NARFFFFF
PLEASE ADOBE FIX THIS
I have a series of 8 digit codes in a catalogue, is there a way to increase the kerning on every 2nd digit so that visually it looks like a space but when I export to pdf it doesn’t actually have a space. i.e people can still search the pdf by the 8 digit code?
renatar: You could use GREP to do it. First make a character style that applies a large amount of Tracking. Then you could use the GREP tab in find/change, or the GREP Styles feature to apply that character style using the grep expression
(?<=\d)\d(Remove the space before the equal sign if you see one. It should just be 'paren, less than, equal, backslash, d, close paren, backslash, d)
unbelievable, thank you so much!!! it is displaying perfectly now.