Participant

Question

Optical Vs. Metric Kerning

Forum|Forum|17 years ago
September 23, 2008
55 replies
113547 views

What are the differences are between "Optical" and "Metric" kerning in InDesign? In what cases would you use one more than the other - is there a hard rule to when you would select either? Or is it just personal preference? Any help is appreciated.

Thanks,

D

Frank Grießhammer

Adobe Employee

I realize this is a 14-year old thread, my response is for anyone having the same question in the future:

Optical vs Metric is not a choice between two equals. In short:

- Metric kerning refers to the kerning built into the font, i.e. as intended by the font developer.

- Optical kerning ignores all kerning in the font and hands over all control of spacing/kerning to InDesign.

When working with professionally-produced fonts, Optical kerning should never be necessary. As mentioned earlier in this thread, Optical will do harm when it comes to connected script fonts, tabular figures, monospaced fonts, etc.
Optical should really only be a last resort – for example in case you have an unkerned font to work with.

In most cases, Metric kerning is preferable.

Frans v.d. Geest

Community Expert

Big problem with Optical if you use Tabular number figures, those should be mono-spaced of course, optical destroys that.

I use metric, as the font was designed. Optical once in a while for big headlines on big posters, maybe...

A

Axminster Crash

Participant

Good point.

Particularly with fonts like Gotham where the figures are already kerned in the metrics. A report & Account doc becomes useless.

But some fonts eg. Bembo type RAILWAY in caps and the metrics are awful. Optical is still bad, but less so.

A

Axminster Crash

Participant

Optical for most but not for script fonts

Mr. Met

Inspiring

Messing with fonts to achieve an aesthetic end is fine. The overall feel I'm getting is that all professionally designed and tested fonts are all wrong which is ludicrous. I kern and scale type too but rarely on long body text runs. Headlines, pull quotes, captions, footers and headers and similar short text blocks that I want to punch up are where I do most of my manipulation. I doubt I would ever scale a body font to 99% for an entire book.

Jongware

Community Expert

>I like $s as guide. If Ive spent $500-$1000 on a text family metrics start to look really good.

There is the solution for font developers: just price more, and the client will assume it's
i supposed
to look that way :-D

(It explains why Minion Pro has such bad kerning in, for example, French contractions: "L'Ascencion" kerns the 'L' and 'A' all the way up to eachother. It's a possible explanation because I got Minion for free.)

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_rob_day_

Participating Frequently

>has finally made it to the slippery slope of personal aesthetics,

I like $s as guide. If Ive spent $500-$1000 on a text family metrics start to look really good.

V

Vernox

Inspiring

Good, the discussion has finally made it to the slippery slope of personal aesthetics, where it belongs. Now we are all on equally unstable footing.

Though I might point out that if, in fact, "looking good" is a personal choice alone then there isn't much point in art or design schools. Just roll your own and be done with it!

Yours
Vern

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_Dave_Saunders_

Inspiring

Richard,

No. My use of it is primarily driven by the fact that it works universally and not just selectively. That, to my mind, is the main problem with metrics. There are only so many metrics included in each font.

Dave

F

Fred Goldman

Inspiring

I really think this is a moot argument. Just as position of text frames,
columns, etc. belong to the designer, so too the way he decides to kern
the type. What's the difference if the type designer wanted it to look
differently? And if I scale type by 1-2% because I think it looks better
am I doing something illegal?

The main thing is that it "looks good" and looking good, as always, has
different definitions depending on the designer.

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_Peter_Truskier_

Participating Frequently

>because they actually intended that it work that way!

Not only that, but there is at least one engineer interested in defending each of them :-)

Mr. Met

Inspiring

If you're using optical kerning universally you're implying that every font is poorly designed which is a load of bs.