Optical Vs. Metric Kerning

My experience agrees with Dave's. I've never felt any resource "hogging" due to the use of Optical Kerning.

This argument seems to me a bit silly. It's all about aesthetics and even more about the kerning pairs in each and every specific font. Some fonts have good built in metrics, and others do not. It is all quite subjective, and there is no right or wrong answer....

>I think it is generally as least as good as metrics, often superior and definitely the way to go unless you want to slave over every kerning pair to get it just so.

But the point with metrics is that a font designer has already slaved over at least a good portion of the kerns to get them "just so". And for those kerns that are automatically generated, if type desigenrs thought that ID's optical kerning was better than the kerning routines they previously used, they would use ID for kerning. To me, for fonts from reputable foundries, it seems obvious that either you get no improvement (if only auto kerning was used) or you lose the advantages of the designer manually checking the kerning. I'm in agreement with Richard here.

If optical kerning slows down my machine, I've never noticed. I think it is generally as least as good as metrics, often superior and definitely the way to go unless you want to slave over every kerning pair to get it just so.

Dave

You may want to look at your font settings and how to adjust letter spacing properly. Contrary to what Nini says, I believe it is bad practice to use optical kerning as a default value. If it were the best way to go, it would be the default setting for ID.

I think it was Michael Murphy who explained it at a recent NYCID users group meeting a few months back while showing how to automate production with style sheets and object styles. Anyone else there remember that? Bob? Sandee?

A major factor in NOT using optical kerning: It is a huge resource hog and will slow down screen redraw/production dramatically.

More links;

Pros and Cons of optical kerning. You'll find it near the bottom of the page

Kerning. Also check out all the topics related to type along the right hand column.

Adjusting letter/word tracking

Thanks the 3 of you for your tips!

I will do more research, but from the first look, body text in Garamond 10 pt, 12 pt space leading, 2 paragraph columns looked better readable in Optics than in Metrics, which was a bit crowded for my impression. I don´t know if that might have a different impact in other font families, but i will read more and thanks again for the links to those articles.

Cheers,

Optical kerning does work well for body copy as well as anything else. It more depends on which font is used and on personal opinions... ;)

Do a bit more research. Generally speaking, optical should only be used for headlines, pull quotes, and larger type sizes. It does not work well on body copy. Do not make optical your default text setting without researching more fully. Optical kerning was created to fix bad kerning pairs which occurs less and less with digital fonts these days. Old bugaboos like an "A" next to a "T" resulting in a huge hole between the two have been amended with each generation and reissue of font faces. The use of optical kerning on headlines is because that's where a gap between letters and punctuation will be more pronounced and need correction to look good.

See InDesign Secrets

Also: metric vs optical

One more: Creative Pro: Metric vs Optical

Any default can be set by changing a value with nothing selected. With no object selected, change the kerning value in the Character panel. This will set the default for the document, but existing text and styles will not change. Change styles in the appropriate style panel, change any other text with Find/Change.

By the way, is there any way to make a whole document OPTICAL by default?

The problem in Gill Sans is the combination of the kerning applied to the space-T (and space-W) and that applied to the period-space pair.

I suppose if InDesign were smart enough to deal with triplets, this wouldn't matter. But up until GREP styles, it hasn't been. Now, with GREP styles, if you're using Gill Sans, you can solve this problem by applying character styles to the triplets (or perhaps even just the space in the triplet) to overcome the this weakness in the Gill Sans built-in kerns.

Dave