photoken hat geschrieben:Herbert123 hat geschrieben: Kerning, baseline offset, and similar properties are things we use for exceptions, not for overall text settings.
No, I also use them, especially the kerning, for overall settings when creating text -- greatly expanding the kerning, for example, to create eye-catching blocks of text, or reducing the kerning to create nice, tightly formatted text blocks.
Herbert123 hat geschrieben:The settings under the "B" tab should be reset back to default normal values after using them for new text boxes.
I disagree. When I'm using the same font in multiple places in a document, I'll want to have the kerning, etc., be the same for each text box.
The values on the "B" tab are easily changed by holding the Ctrl key while dragging the left mouse button.
The real issue here is that Photoline offers no tracking option: tracking increases or decreases the overall space between all characters and words. Kerning is completely different, and ideally the designer should avoid it for those things, because kerning is NOT the same as letter spacing or tracking. Kerning is used by a typographer to decide what the distance between a specific letter pair should be for optimum legibility. Kerning is generally used in graphic design and layout to mitigate kerning problems after scaling up text for a large heading, for example, because most fonts' kerning tables are created for body text use, not for very large headings.
Currently Photoline remembers the kerning setting for the last selected instance of text and applies it indiscriminately for any new text box. When I happen to have clicked between two letters with custom kerning set, and I create a new text box afterwards, that kerning value is applied to all the new text I copy or type - forcing me to reset that value to zero. And forcing me to select all the text first as well.
It just makes no sense from a typography point of view, or a graphic designer's point of view, because kerning is NOT supposed to be abused for overall text spacing: only for specific letter pairs. Tracking is used for that.
And the same holds (mostly) true for baseline shift.
Look, I can sort of understand when this happens within the same document (although it really should not), but at least give me an option in the preferences to turn this behaviour off. But what I do not understand is why the kerning setting is remembered even after creating a NEW document!!! I want reasonable default text settings to begin with when starting a NEW document - not the old settings taken from an old one. The text settings SHOULD be reset to smart defaults in that case.
Because otherwise there is a genuine risk the new document applies a singular custom kerning to ALL THE TEXT in my NEW layout, and I become paranoid about whether those settings are correct or not. It is way too finicky and prone to silly mistakes, because Photoline will keep the kerning setting depending on where I clicked last in a heading or text.
Worse, the kerning setting is saved in a paragraph style in Photoline. That is just plain wrong! Why would you want to save an overall kerning value in a paragraph style?! Again, this leads me to think that Photoline confuses KERNING and TRACKING. Kerning should NOT be abused for tracking, nor should it be saved in a paragraph style. Again, a custom kerning is used for EXCEPTIONS to the regular kerning table embedded in a font. TRACKING, however, IS something that should be saved in a character and paragraph style.
That is why you'll find no kerning option in either paragraph or character styles in InDesign, QuarkXpress, Illustrator, Freehand (called "range kerning" instead), Scribus, and any other graphic design/layout software: kerning is not tracking, and tracking is not kerning.
Only Photoline takes a different route, and confuses tracking and kerning.
