When to Kern

The objective of kerning is to achieve the appearance of equal spacing on either side of each character. Thankfully, the majority of your kerning needs are addressed by InDesign's automatic kerning methods, of which there are two kinds: Metrics and Optical. Either method adequately handles kerning at small type sizes, so you don't need to drive yourself crazy finding every instance of troublesome kerning pairs and manually adjusting their spacing. Regardless of the method you use, you can always add manual kerning as needed.

Figure 5.1. Why we kern. (A) No kerning, (B) Metrics Kerning, (C) Optical Kerning, (D) Optical Kerning with additional manual kerning.

Figure 5.2. Basic Character Formats.

Automatic kerning can be applied locally by selecting a range of text, then choosing Metrics or Optical from the Control palette (or the Character palette), but you're better off choosing your automatic kerning method as part of a style sheet definition.


Part I: Character Formats

Getting Started

Going with the Flow

Character Reference

Getting the Lead Out

Kern, Baby, Kern

Sweating the Small Stuff: Special Characters, White Space, and Glyphs

OpenType: The New Frontier in Font Technology

Part II: Paragraph Formats

Aligning Your Type

Paragraph Indents and Spacing

First Impressions: Creating Great Opening Paragraphs

Dont Fear the Hyphen

Mastering Tabs and Tables

Part III: Styles

Stylin with Paragraph and Character Styles

Mo Style

Part IV: Page Layout

Setting Up Your Document

Everything in Its Right Place: Using Grids

Text Wraps: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Type Effects



InDesign Type. Professional Typography with Adobe InDesign CS2
InDesign Type: Professional Typography with Adobe InDesign CS2
ISBN: 0321385446
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 186
Authors: Nigel French

Flylib.com © 2008-2020.
If you may any questions please contact us: flylib@qtcs.net