July 20 2008 • 6:34 AM
InDesignSecrets Podcast 082
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Read the transcript of this podcast here.
* Do’s and Don’ts of Text in InDesign: Double spaces and returns, proper use of character styles, case changes, discretionary hyphens, text framitis, more
* The Strange Case of the Space-Eating Hair Space
* Obscure InDesign Feature of the Week: Join
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Links mentioned in this podcast:
Anne-Marie’s presenting two InDesign sessions at the Creative Transitions conference (Milwaukee, WI; Aug 13-15); enter AMC0808 on the conference registration page for a $100 discount
David’s original post, Do’s and Don’ts of Text in InDesign
Robin Williams’ The Mac is Not a Typewriter or The PC is Not a Typewriter
Nigel French’s InDesign Type: Professional Typography in Adobe InDesign
Nigel French’s InDesign Type: Professional Typography in Adobe InDesign
The Chicago Manual of Style (U of Chicago Press staff)
Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots & Leaves
William Strunk’s The Elements of Style
Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style
Teacup Software’s TypeFitter plug-in
The hair-space kerning problem has a number of facets:
1. We’re lectured on-and-on by type experts that metrics is the way to go because the font designer sweated blood over those metrics so we should benefit from their expertise.
2. But they demonstrate their lack of understanding by having space characters on both sides of kern pairs in their fonts — what a disaster. That’s why double-spaces are necessary between sentences in some fonts because the blasted metrics kerning wipes them out.
3. Hair space, etc, are not glyphs in the fonts. They’re creations by InDesign. So there’s no way they can be included in the metrics. But for InDesign to say that it is not a bug to apply the same kerning to an element that is 24 to the em (hair space) as it applies to an element that is 3 or 4 to the em (regular space) is a stretch in my humble opinion.
4. Metrics only work within a font, so if you have a mix of faces or formatting in a run of text, the metrics don’t exist and you get no kerning where you often need it.
5. Optical kerning (as mentioned by David and Anne-Marie) applies in all these problem cases and it has built-in tracking (in the old PageMaker sense, not the Quark/ID range-kerning sense) so that small type is pushed apart and large type is pulled together.
So, while I don’t belittle the intentions of the font designers in their work to provide carefully considered kern-pairs, they are wasting their time as far as I’m concerned and they’re doing damage if they are foolish enough to have spaces on either side of pairs with negative kerning.
Mind you, InDesign could even do better here. If you have, for example, “. T” in sequence, InDesign should ignore the “. ” pair and ” T” pair, both of which are likely to have large amounts of negative kerning and instead look at the “.T” pair and apply that to one or other of the pairs making up the triplet.
But still, optical kerning already has that effect, so I’m not sure I’d advocate the InDesign team putting any more effort into what I think of as an obsolete technology. Instead, I’d have them focus entirely on improving optical kerning.
In that last sentence, I meant “focus entirely any resources they consider appropriate for attending to font kerning on improving optical kerning.” Not focus on optical kerning to the exclusion of everything else.
I didn’t notice the ambiguity until my 10 minutes were up.
Dave
Dave, your ten minutes are up and gone! But thanks for an interesting posting on the metrics/optical issue. I’ve so far usually applied metrics to bodycopy and optical to LARGE text, due to the “received wisdom,” but I will now experiment a bit more with optical also for bodycopy.
David had said previously that he didn’t apply Optical Kerning to body because because it took a lot of processing power. But in most of my projects I use optical kerning for almost all type, and haven’t seen a slow-down at all, FWIW.
David,
Regarding the “Join” command—there is also a “Paths:Connect” command hidden in the keyboard shortcuts.
I tested this, and using “Connect” connects the two paths by creating a line segment—”Join” really does merge the two points and create a single line.
Perhaps you assigned your key-command to “Connect” instead of “Join.” (They’re right above and below in the dialog.)
dt
I tend to leave kerning to the font metrics unless I see a problem, usually in larger type… but that’s mostly out of laziness since it’s the default. Every time I use it, though, I’m amazed at how much better the optical kerning is than the metrics (in headline sizes at least). I definitely need to get into the habit of comparing the two more often.
I just had another thought: it might be a useful feature for future versions of ID to have some sort of a context-sensitive changing of kern method. (i.e. an option in preferences to set threshold for fonts above “x” or below “y” to automatically receive the optical treatment.)
I guess you could also do this manually with a script that could be run towards the end of the creative process.
Anyway, thanks for another thought-provoking episode. I think you should seriously consider spinning off a “Join-Feature Secrets” podcast.
Optical kerning definitely takes much more processing power. You might or might not notice it in regular use. One place it’s very noticeable, is with scripting. Text processing in long stories will take much longer if optical kerning is active.
Dave,
Could you explain what you mean “having space characters on both sides of kern pairs in their fonts”?
Could you give me an example of what you are talking about?
I suspect the mystery of why David’s shortcut and Anne-Marie’s for joining paths were doing different things is that David’s shortcut is actually running “Paths:Connect” instead of “Paths:Join”. The Connect function does, indeed, insert a path segment; Join does not.
Fred,
I did in my discussion of the “. T” triplet. “. ” has the space on the right while ” T” has it on the left. Put the three together and the space is severely crimped and disappears altogether in some fonts — Gill Sans being the most famous example.
Dave
@Daniel and Alan: Yes, I’m aware of the Paths:Connect feature (we would have talked about it in the post if our conversation about our different experiences with Join hadn’t rambled on so long… believe me, that “tick tock” effect was far more interesting than the actual discussion!).
No, I’m not using Connect. I’m using Join, but sometimes it does a “join” and sometimes it does a “connect” — primarily with odd-shaped lines drawn with the Pencil tool. I’ve got a query in to Adobe about the inconsistent behavior. It’s a weird one! We’ll let you know when or if we ever figure it out.
@Dave
Interesting, I went through a lot of my fonts and Gil Sans seems to be the only real culprit.
To me it seems as though in general Gil Sans has way too much kerning between space and punctuation. It looks horrible no matter what combination it is.
I don’t see why a threesome should ever cause any more problems than a twosome. If ” T” need kerning and “. ” need kerning then why wouldn’t the three together need kerning. The problem with Gil Sans is that ” .” don’t need kerning (at least not the ridiculous amounts that it currently has).
In general, the whole idea that the punctuation space combination need kerning doesn’t seem right to me.
Great podcast, as always.
Here are some comments:
1. The hidden Path command were also available in CS2 (at least this is when I encountered them, and been spilling their secret hiding-place since).
2. Although hidden, in CS3 the hidden Path commands (and some other) will show-up in the Quick Apply interface, so you can get to them and run them without assigning shortcuts that you then have to remember. For example, to connect 2 selected endpoints, press Command/Ctrl+Return to display the Quick Apply panel, type “connect”, scroll to and select “Object Menu:Path>Connect”.
3. InDesign contains some “embedded” hidden shortcuts, which are so secret that they’re not even listed in the keyboard shortcuts interface (or poster), so you must dig them out from the shortcuts documentation in the InDesign help.
Two of those are the “Increase kerning between words” and “Decrease kerning between words”, which is basically the starting point of what Teacup’s Type Fitter plug-in does, only the PI affords much more robust features (I’ve been using it since the CS days).
4. Using optical kerning, especially on justified text, will cause the layout process to become much heavier and will result in slower more sluggish behavior. Apply justification values for Letter Spacing and Glyph Scaling, and it becomes worse. And the slower your machine is, the more you suffer.
From my point of view, optical kerning is meant to be used locally.
@Adi: Great points. One correction: The increase/decrease word spacing (kerning on space characters between words) is on the Keyboard Shortcuts poster. We wouldn’t leave that one out!
@David: I stand corrected.
I’m fairly new to InDesign and found everything about font and text very useful. Thanks for these podcasts!