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!
It is the design community which is gravitating towards optical kerning. As fabricators we need to follow suit. Here's an excellent video which explains the difference between metric and optical kerning. https://youtu.be/PpydRNkFxgk?t=261 (I jumped you to the point of the video that explains this but the whole video is worth a watch.)
Even the video says optical kerning should be used under certain conditions even when setting regular type and is a case by case decision.
Mike
Some need it. Some don’t. Some would benefit from it and don’t know how helpful it is
I need it to save time.
Those who collaborate with others who use Adobe products need it.
Those who want to have fine control over their design would greatly benefit from it as a design option and time saver.
My hope is that Corel will continue their previous efforts to provide typographical improvements. Great improvements were introduced a few releases ago. But there’s more to do if the goal is provide professional tools for professional use.
To date, Adobe has the feature. At some point I expect Affinity to add it given their expressed intent towards excellence.
I know it takes development effort and perhaps most Corel users would not use it. But features like this reveal a lot about the developer’s goal to either provide a top-level professional product or settle for really good but incomplete enthusiast product. I’m hoping for the former, because Corel has so much to offer and it would open the door for more professional users. Seems like a worthy marketing opportunity.
As far as I know, Serif won't be adding optical kerning.
I've done "competitions" with various InDesign Gurus over optical versus metric kerning. Heck, I even submitted one full-page Word created PDF that took a light table to see the differences. And in the end, most all of them leave it off as a default anyway.
I do agree that crap typefaces, or otherwise nice faces with poor kerning, that ID can best the font's kerning by using optical kerning. But in more than a thousand books and manuals I have done over the years, I've never used optical kerning.
In a narrow-column (like a newspaper or multi-column, small-print book), it causes more issues than it resolves (same with the Paragraph composer versus the single line composer). Some pairs it totally screws up, making them too tight in some places and too loose in others. Shutting it off in those cases improves the readability.
Ultimately I don't care if Corel adds it. I'll leave it turned off (and off should be the default).
There are more things for Corel to flesh out, bugs to squish, etc., and if I had a vote, it would be those things I wish were done before optical kerning.
I'm not disagreeing with everyone's opinion on the usefulness of optical kerning. The problem is that when the industry says "we want Optical Kerning because that is what we want" then you must comply of move out of the way. Who is the industry? I'm referring to "top" interior and architectural design firms and "top" projects. For example - there is a hospital system in New York City that requires everything to be optically kerned. It's a lot of signs, graphics and print in dozens of separate locations. We must use Adobe Illustrator to typeset their copy because they require optical kerning. It's a huge inconvenience but if we want the work - we must comply otherwise someone else will do it.
Very much agree with PrecisionSigns. For those who do not recognize the value and usefulness of optical kerning for their work, please don’t dismiss the reality that this feature has become a significant element of professional workflows. If someone is setting 10pt type, the difference may not be apparent. But when designing messaging for signage on a large project, that feature can save hours of manually kerning. I have always preferred CorelDRAW versus Illustrator in both the interface and the overall features, and the cost savings is a bonus. But this one feature, keeps me having to use Illustrator as a final step in the messaging design process. Yes. I have to leave my preferred application to complete the final output in a competitor’s application. For small projects, I’ll just stay in CD. As I’m manually kerning, I’m thinking this is a waste of time. I really just ought to switch to a technology that saves professional sign designers many, many hours of tedious dinasour labor. I hope Corel will take this serious. It’s a great opportunity to not only gain market share, but to not lose long-term users. Been using CD since version 9. It’s time to develop for professionals or you’ll lose them.
I think you are agreeing with me not Mike :)