Inspiring

Answered

optical kerning for just one letter?

Forum|Forum|2 years ago
August 24, 2023
5 replies
436 views

I'm using Garamond for a long book project in indesign cs6. I noticed, after it was all laid out, that words ending in f (off, if, of) have a wider space than words ending in other letters. It's fixed by optical kerning of those situations, but there are 2000+ of them.

Is there possibly a way to globally change to optical kerning for just one letter?

Thanks!

d

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Correct answer D. Schulte

What does your Kerning setting say? If it's "Metrics" try setting it to "Optical". If that already helps, you can change the paragraph style instead of using a character style for each letter which will save CPU.

leilagoldAuthor

Inspiring

Thanks all! You've given me the courage to move the entre book to optical. I was concerned that it would alter some of the spacing with photos, but it's not too bad, and I need to review it anyway.

What a help you all are!

Thanks again!

D. SchulteCorrect answer

Participating Frequently

What does your Kerning setting say? If it's "Metrics" try setting it to "Optical". If that already helps, you can change the paragraph style instead of using a character style for each letter which will save CPU.

Brad @ Roaring Mouse

Community Expert

If you are using the TrueType version of Garamond (like the one that comes with a Mac), there's a historical issue with wonky glyph metrics, i.e. there's a weird kerning pair for an f followed by a space. Why, no one knows because it's the only letter in the glyph set that HAS a kerning pair with a space. It's even worse in italic.

Personally, I would switch to a better version of Garamond (e.g. Garamond Premier), but failing that, what I suggest is you switch your Character specs to use Optical kerning instead of metrics:

Peter Kahrel

Community Expert

If your book is long you should avoid GREP styles, they can make a document slower. You can use this script to adjust kerning:

https://creativepro.com/files/kahrel/indesign/kern.html

Willi Adelberger

Community Expert

Make for that letter a character style.
in the paragraph styles go to GREP and choose the character style for this letter. Instead of a formula write this letter.

Peter Spier

Community Expert

If you want to use a GREP style for this you would want to use f/s rater than just f to keep the adjustment to only thiose cases wher the f falls before a space.

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