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InDesign Kerning-Bug (DE/EN)

Forum|Forum|11 months ago
March 3, 2025
3 replies
1394 views

(DE) Ich habe in InDesign das Problem, dass sich beim Einstellen des Kerning-Abstands nicht nur der Abstand zwischen den gewünschten Zeichen verändert, sondern auch andere Abstände beeinflusst werden. Das Problem tritt bei allen getesteten Schriften auf und betrifft sowohl den optischen als auch den metrischen Kerning-Modus. Danke

(EN) I have an issue in InDesign where adjusting the kerning not only changes the spacing between the selected characters but also affects various other spacings. This problem occurs with all tested fonts and in both optical and metric kerning modes. Thanks

Correct answer Peter Kahrel

Interesting. I'll have to try it when I get to my production computer.

I looked up Affinity Page kerning specs (I own the Affinity programs too). It looks to be the same amounts as InDesign's. But I did learn a new word: "permilles", which is a parts per thousand. In this case, 1/1000 of an em.

I can confirm that the problem doesn't occur in Affinity, so it looks as if this is an Adobe problem.

@Holger Walter34008837xo0j : Go to https://indesign.uservoice.com to log a bug.

Abhishek Rao

Community Manager

Hi everyone,

Thank you for all the detailed observations and for sharing your findings around this kerning issue. I'm checking this with the product team to get more clarity and will update back here as soon as I have more information from them.

Appreciate your patience and support.

Abhishek

Mike Witherell

Community Expert

When I watch the video, I see you (probably) kerning between the characters on the left tighter or looser. That means that all the rest of the characters to the right of the insertion point are also going to move.

But because InDesign's typesetting engine is also "musing" several outcomes and finally settling on one, any kerning in the line of text can trigger InDesign to re-think the rest of the line and/or paragraph. That is what Paragraph Composer does.

To test that theory, change your paragraph style to call for Paragraph Composer and also test the behavior when set to Single Line Composer. Perform your kerning under both conditions and see if the problem persists or is different.

Oh, just one more thing: always use the correct spell-check language on the text. In your example, you are kerning English-language words while the text language is set to German. See the red squiggle underscoring? That might be confusing the matter.

Mike Witherell

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Holger Walter34008837xo0jAuthor

Known Participant

Thanks also to you for the help. Unfortunately, it didn't help.

H

Holger Walter34008837xo0jAuthor

Known Participant

By the way, I am using the latest Windows 11 Pro with the latest InDesign version.

Peter Kahrel

Community Expert

This looks like a display problem. You can check whether the space between the p and the r (in your example) really changes by taking the horizontal position of the r before and after applying the kerning. The cursor position's horizontal position is shown in the Info panel (F8 or Window > Info).

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Holger Walter34008837xo0jAuthor

Known Participant

That was a good tip, thanks! And yes, it does shift, and it's indeed a display-bug. However, I also have this display issue on another device with Windows 10 and a different GPU. So it seems to be a general Windows problem? But how can I set good kerning if I can't trust the display? 😞

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