Remedial Font Spacing

Most fonts are carefully designed so the spacing between any pair of numbers and or letters is appropriate. Sometimes we run into a font with spacing problems, but we must live with the font. This is the situation we found ourselves in with a display font we use for a newsletter created in FrameMaker and delivered in PDF format.

The Problem

The font we use for headlines is a very blocky sans-serif font. The spacing around the digit one is far too wide. There's too much space both before and after the character. Pair kerning has absolutely no effect on this spacing. The problem could occur with any character, and the solution should apply to any character with this type of problem spacing.

The Solution

Open Character Designer. Select the character before the before the problem character and the character itself (in this case the digit one). Apply a negative spread just to those two characters. You don't want to select the character after the problem character. You'll have to experiment with the percentage; -15% worked best in this case.

Jo Baer
Senior Technical Writer
TCF National Bank
Minneapolis, Minnesota
jbaer@mailbox1.tcfbank.com

InFrame Magazine http://www.inframe-mag.com Publisher: Dennis Hays Editor: Bill Swallow