The Need for Text Kerning Improvements

Greetings Corel Community! After 22 years of using CorelDraw as a tool for doing shop drawings for millions of dollars worth of sign products I thought I would share my opinion for the need of better kerning tools. We are huge CorelDraw fans and continue to be enthusiastic about it's development and future. I present a constructive proposal to imporove Corel's ability to adjust the kerning between text. For those that do not know "Kerning" is the action taken to adjust the space between letters that visually have an imbalanced amount of white space between them. Very often this can be observed with letter pairs such as "Va", "Ta" "OA", etc. There is no right or wrong with Kerning - only the aspiration to achieve perfect balance of white space. Perfect balance visually improves the text. Most well constructed fonts have good kerning tables where these letter pairs are adjusted by values. Other fonts however are not so perfect and do not look very unblanced and unprofessional when typed out. This leads to the need to have a way to adjust the kerning between pairs of letters in CorelDraw.

The current way to adjust kerning between letters is to either:

a.) Select the "Shape" tool and manually drag the node between text characters to adjust the kerning. If you want all the letters to the right or left to move as well then drag a lasso around the nodes for those letters and move them. Hold control to constrain them to an axis.

b.) Adjust the character spacing between letters by adjusting the value in the Paragraph Formatting Docker. You can adjust the entire line or just highlight specific characters and adjust the value for them. This is entered as a percentage.

I find both of these methods workable however inefficient from a process point and stagnating in forward development. I propose that in addition to these controls that we:

1.) Have hot keys that can be used to manually adjust kerning while in the process of typing out text. This would be something like CTRL - < or (Arrow key etc) to reduce the space between the current letter and the next typed letter. This is more efficient in many ways then letting go of the keyboard and selecting the mouse to manually adjust letters.

2.) Include a new option check box for "Optical Kerning" which is rapidly becoming an industry standard for Illustrator users. This option uses an algorithm to automatically adjust the kerning between letters in order to achieve balanced optical (visual) kerning.

3.) While I am not a fan of Illustrator I do find that the collaborating companies I work with (in the design industry) rely heavily on it. It would make sense if the text controls and values entered within Corel would match the same text results entered in illustrator. For example - an option to call the character spacing "tracking" would be helpful if the resulting values make the text match both. Currently we need to keep both products on hand. Illustrator for doing a lot of type setting (Tracking, Optical Kerning etc.) and then exporting to EPS to bring into Corel where we do our actual work. I'm sure we're not alone with this needs and would desire to use Corel as a sole product. That would however require a guarantee for our collaborators that our text will match theirs 100% without discrepancy.  

Thanks for listening!