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Author Topic: Kerning slider accuracy  (Read 2724 times)
Ray Larabie
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« on: 2009-04-28, 01:04:23 »

When I'm adjusting kerning, I tend to click the glyphs and drag them until they kerning looks correct as opposed to adjusting them with the arrow keys. When glyphs are viewed large (128 or higher), I can get decent accuracy by dragging, right down to the exact number I want. At smaller sizes the increments become more coarse. I change size a lot so often I have trouble nailing a particular number*. I carefully twitch the trackball but, since the slider is based on pixels the numbers jump in increments. It would be a real improvement if these adjustments were not based on pixels but on mouse movement. I don't know if that's possible but if it is, I sure would like it.

* If I'm adjusting visually, why do I need to hit a particular number? I guess I don't need to but it's what I do. Sometimes I'll have some numbers in my head, like: O kerned to period is -16 . . . U kerned to to period is -8. So when I'm kerning using paragraphs of text, I'll be happily sliding letters together and I'll encounter a J period. I start sliding it and I remember U to period is -8, so I try to slide it to -8 . . . but I can only hit -7 or -9 no matter how steady my trackball movements are.  Angry
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jamespuckett
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« Reply #1 on: 2009-05-01, 12:07:27 »

If you hold down the option key kerning is changed in single units.
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Arno Enslin
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« Reply #2 on: 2009-05-02, 11:56:50 »

Ray

Although jamespuckett’s tip using the option (alternate) key works fine, you also can expand the panel of the metrics window and display the kerning or the plain metrics of the text you type in. And in the expanded panel you also can change the values. (I don’t mean the table of all pairs or metrics at the right side of the metrics window.):
Header Panel / Options / (Activate) Panel
(The header panel is the panel, where you can type in your text.)
or
Main Menu / View / Toolbars / (Activate) Metrics Commands
and hit the item Expand the panel of the toolbar Metrics Commands.

« Last Edit: 2009-05-04, 10:08:15 by Arno Enslin » Logged
Ray Larabie
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« Reply #3 on: 2009-05-06, 02:29:41 »

Ah there it is. Thanks so much.
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jamespuckett
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« Reply #4 on: 2009-05-10, 01:13:53 »

And if you really want to have fun, you can adjust kerning and metrics values using the arrow keys in combination with cmd, opt, and ctrl to change things in units of one and ten. Unfortunately these shortcuts are undocumented and behave differently depending on whether letters are selected as text or directly in the metrics/kerning table, so it takes a while to get used to them, and I’m not entirely sure if they’re buggy or if I just still haven’t got them worked out.

Honestly, this is why I was happy to buy Metrics Machine. Sure you might still have to do a little fine-tuning in FLAB, but MM really negates so many gripes I have about kerning.
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Tags: kern  kerning  wish  Fontlab 
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