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garetht60389594
Participant
October 9, 2023
Question

Unequal Character Tracking on Circular Paths

  • October 9, 2023
  • 3 replies
  • 281 views

Photoshop version: 25.0 (and earlier)

OS: Windows 10

 

To reproduce: Use the elipse tool in shape mods to create a circle, click the type tool and click on the path to type around the circle, enter 000 and try to adjust the tracking to make them touch.

 

Expected result: Characters should be spaced equally. Changing tracking for a single character should move the next character.

 

Actual result: Spacing is unequal. Changing tracking for a single character sometimes moves the next character, sometimes the previous one (and you can never get the spacing equal).

 

    This topic has been closed for replies.

    3 replies

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    OlivierT4S
    Participating Frequently
    October 9, 2023

    Upon closer inspection, I notice the cursor for the first letter is not vertical at 90° (you can usually move them and they snap to the path vertexes). So the first letter you type is slightly slanted; thus any font, spacing, setting etc will have innacurate position. You can see on the screenshot, the cursor is slanted between the 2 green parallel lines, it should be straight 90°.

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      garetht60389594Author
      Participant
      October 9, 2023

      Thanks for the reply. Definitely agree about the variability of results - here's an example at higher resolution, with 0-kerning and sharp antialiasing. The characters are wildly off here, despite all being set to use -100 tracking!

        O
        OlivierT4S
        Participating Frequently
        October 9, 2023

        Hi,

        I also noticed this issue, with any font I tried. Depending on your font aliasing method, and image size, results greatly vary. Also the baseline is not very accurate, the left 0 is above the circle but the right 0 is a bit lower (over the circle).

        The best setting I found to mitigate this issue is to use a "kerning=0" instead of  "optical" or "metric" and a sharp aliasing (see screenshot).

        It could just be an interpolation issue on the pixel grid on low res images, and only a very large image can interpolate fonts better, thanks to a denser pixel grid.

        Hope it helps.

        Regards,

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