Text not staying on baseline when rotated

Report · Sep 26, 2019

I've tried searching for anyone else having this issue, but I'm not finding anything. When I'm rotating a block of text, my curved characters are off the baseline. Lowercase a,c,d,e,o,u, etc.

My client is wondering why it looks so funky and I can't figure out why its doing it. Has anyone else run into this and do you have a fix? Details below.

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Software: InDesign 14.0.3, Illustrator 22.0.6, Acrobat Pro DC 2019.012.20040

Compurer: Macbook Pro 15", 2018

OS: macOS Mojave 10.14.6

Fonts: ITC Charter Com Bold, ITC Charter Com Regular, HelveticaNeueLTPro-Roman.ttf, HelveticaNeueLTPro-Bd.ttf

InDesign

Here's the way it looks on my non-retina display monitor:

Charter regular and bold used. Angle of rotation 11.5˚

Its really obvious in the bold characters that they are off the baseline. When I go to a 0˚ angle it looks right:

I also tried it at 1˚:

11˚:

So I thought maybe I needed to use a rotation preset, so I 45˚, but they jump back on the baseline:

Ok, I thought, maybe its a preset thing, but 45˚ is too hard to read so I tried 30˚. No luck, off the baseline again.

The only "fix" I can seem to find is to convert the text to outlines at 0˚ and then rotate. If I convert while rotated, it keeps the weird jumping characters.

When I view these in Acrobat DC, it actually seems to exaggerate the baseline issue:

Anyone else run into this or happen to have a fix for it? I'd really rather not convert all the text I have on angles to outlines....

Thanks,
Karen

Report · Sep 26, 2019

I don't think there is a problem. InDesign is just not rendering the rotated text well. Perhaps the hinting algorithms built into the font are "correcting" the appearance of the letters inconsistently so it looks like they are shifted. They will print fine. If you want to test this export to PDF then rasterize in Photoshop ata high resolution.

Report · Sep 26, 2019

It may be a font issue. Have you tried others? Using Helv Neue LT Pro & rotating 9º looks ok on my end.

Report · Sep 26, 2019

Having the same issue with our version of Helvetica Neue

Report · Sep 26, 2019

Dave_C here's a screencapt of Helvetica Neue

Report · Sep 26, 2019

If you print it out, does it look funky? It may just be a rendering issue.

Report · Sep 26, 2019

Looks ok printed, but when I export to pdf its keeping the wonky text. And my client wants to email it not print it. (yeah, I know, its a pdf...)

Report · Sep 26, 2019

That's very curious.

Try aligning the text to a custom baseline grid (Object>Text Frame Options>Baseline Options). Unlike a document baseline grid, a custom baseline grid will rotate with the text frame.

This might work, but I can't replicate the problem and think, like Scott and Dave, that it's probably a rendering issue.

Report · Sep 26, 2019

Dang I was so hoping the custom baseline would work:

InDesign:

Acrobat:

Its better, but still pretty easy to spot. I guess I'll go with outlining it. I was wondering if this was an issue with the latest updates.

However, on a side note, on my retina display, it looks better...?!?!

InDesign