Scale tool not accurately keeping text proportions and line breaks

[vv3226083]

In Illustrator CC v22, I'm using the scale tool on a text box. While shift+dragging, the text looks correct (just scaled proportionally, without any reflow or stretching), but when releasing the mouse, there is suddenly some text reflow on some of the lines. This destroys some very carefully set line breaks. What I want to happen is to make the text column larger with the line breaks exactly the same.

This is not an issue of just scaling the box, the text itself is also changing size - but not accurately. What's going on?

I get the same behavior when using the transform function and manually setting a scale value. Checking/unchecking the "scale strokes and effects" in the transform dialog doesn't have any effect.

The most frustrating thing is that once I have scaled to a new size (with the broken flow), scaling seems to work just fine - I can use the scale tool to proportionally scale the text with the "wrong" line breaks. It doesn't come up with new text flow each time.

My only workaround at the moment is to convert to paths and then scale, but this is a pain and makes consistency a nightmare when trying to match path text to regular text. Any ideas?

[Kurt Gold]

Are you using the latest version of Illustrator (22.1)?

[Ton Frederiks]

Are you scaling Point Type or Area Type?

[vv3226083]

It's area type, justified alignment.

Before scaling:

After scaling:

[Ton Frederiks]

I see (and can replicate that).

Point type does not reflow, but does not work with justified text.

It may sound silly, but why don't you scale first and then set your line breaks.

[vv3226083]

Thanks for the suggestion.

Scaling first and then setting line breaks might work in some cases when the job is smaller, but it would be a huge pain in my case.

I have copied the correctly line-breaked text from another AI file, where everything was very carefully laid out. We have more than 30 columns of text in 3 different languages. Doing this all over again manually would take forever and be extremely tedious. It would also require an additional review round by the native speakers of each language. The convert-to-outlines-then-scale workaround has plenty of its own problems, but is an easier option in this case.  

I'm really annoyed that something SHOULD work, and for some reason, it just doesn't.

[Ton Frederiks]

I checked with InDesign, but that gives the same result.

I wondered if the composer made a difference, but I could not see a difference.

Maybe the kerning that is build into the font changes with the size?

[vv3226083]

I am now suspecting that the font tracking / kerning does not scale properly when resizing. If so, that's really dumb.

[Ton Frederiks]

  wrote

I am now suspecting that the font tracking / kerning does not scale properly when resizing. If so, that's really dumb.

Yes, I guess that different kerning is applied by the type engine for larger sizes than for small sizes, which makes sense.

[vv3226083]

It may be throwing out the tracking settings entirely, since once the resize snaps into the new "wrong" line breaks, you can modify the scaling again from there and it will keep that proportion. So if this is the case, the question to Adobe is: how to keep font tracking values scaling proportionally when resizing?

[Ton Frederiks]

Well, that question/suggestion is better asked here:

Adobe Illustrator Feedback

[vv3226083]

Thanks, I've posted the issue there as well.

[Shawn25325678s69g]

I've discovered the same issue. Font tracking/kerning does not scale proportionally. I'm using Illustrator 26.1. Any solutions on this yet? It definitely SHOULD work, but cleary it does not.

[Monika Gause]

Please post bugs & feature requests to http://illustrator.uservoice.com