Precise alignment of text

> well, the alignment, the values for kerning, could be scripted.

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

It contains (among other things) a section on how to use the method described by Uwe.

P.

Hi Arjun,

well, the alignment, the values for kerning, could be scripted.

However, with fancy fonts, eg. for handwriting, you still have to this individually.

Regards,
Uwe Laubender

( ACP )

A blank character is invisible by default. Depending on the justification you would best do this with a fixed width character without any width: A SpecialCharacters.ZERO_WIDTH_NONJOINER would do.

Sorry, but I did not save the document after doing my screenshot.

Best try this yourself. Add a blank character at the beginning of a paragraph.

And kern between that blank character and the first character of your inital paragraph.

Basically that's it. And yes, the kerning values are up to you and your typographical eye.

You may ask how to add that special character I mentioned above:
Just put your text cursor in front of your first character and execute the following ExtendScript (JavaScript) script code:

app.selection[0].texts[0].insertionPoints[0].contents =
SpecialCharacters.ZERO_WIDTH_NONJOINER;

Or select the paragraph and do a GREP Find/Change action:

Find pattern:

(^.)

Change pattern:

\x{200C}$1

Scope:

Selection

Regards,
Uwe Laubender

( ACP )

Hi arjun2,

if the two lines are one paragraph each you could add a blank character as the first character in each paragraph and do kerning between the blank and the first reading character in the paragraph. From my German InDesign where I used a text frame inset of 2 mm to better show the first blank in every paragraph:

The first two character pairs in every paragraph are differently kerned.

Above the text cursor is between the blank and the character I of the second paragraph where I did a manual kerning of -280.

Regards,
Uwe Laubender

( ACP )