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• • June 30, 2013 at 2:47 pm #34114
    Grace Peirce

    Member

    Hello! InDesign CS5, OSX 10.6.8. I recently ran into a problem with automatic kerning on a font called Bembo, with the space after periods and commas being so tight, it appeared that there was no space between the period / space / Capital letter of next sentence. The automatic kerning value before capital letters A, W, T, J, I, and possibly a few others, appeared very tight sometimes, and just fine other times. The value in parentheses in the kerning value before the first capital letter in the sentence was (-123). So that often it would look like this:

    end of sentence.At the beginning…

    And there was a space typed between the period and the A. This was justified text, 11 pt on a 27 pica line length, and the word and letter spacing settings were left at InDesign’s default. When the paragraph was tight, The space between period and “A” would disappear. When the paragraph was normal or loose, there was no problem.

    Is it the font? Or combination of font and InDesign’s kerning values?

    Fixing this was a nightmare. 192 pages of text to go through, searching for period space and offending letter, and then manually fixing each one so that it appeared “normal.”

    Is there an easy fix for this? Since I never experience this issue with most of the fonts I use, I’m blaming it on Bembo.

    Why in the world would this be acceptable, I have to wonder?

    Anyone have any suggestions / ideas for me? Mystery solutions? Thank you!

  • July 4, 2013 at 6:05 am #34178
    Masood Ahmad

    Participant

    Try this: select the paragraph and set the kerning to “Optics” rather than “Metrics”. It will override the methematically calculated kerning values set in the font at the time of creating it by the font developer. Also try No Ligatures.

    Hope this work out.

  • July 4, 2013 at 7:26 am #34179
    Grace Peirce

    Member

    thanks — you are right — that is the fix for this font. unfortunately it was already indexed, so doing that would have reflowed most of the pages and rendered the index unusable. But next time I will know. I discovered that the Type 1 Postscript Font Bembo is flawed — the kerning table was never completed properly for that font.

    “The case is sol-ved.” -Inspector Clouseau

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