Optical sizes When documents were printed using metal type, each size of a typeface was created with subtle variations to ensure that the character and legibility of the typeface was retained throughout the range of sizes. For example, the versions designed for smaller sizes typically have wider spacing, for legibility, whereas the versions for larger sizes have finer details and greater stroke contrast, for elegance. With digital type we have the ability to scale a font to any size, but this doesn't take account of the appearance of type at different sizes. Several type designers have therefore created digital typeface families with versions of the typeface designed for use at different sizes. These are called opticals, or optical sizes, to reflect the fact that they are intended for viewing at a particular size.
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Although naming conventions vary, families with optical sizes typically include two or more versions intended for the following uses: Caption: For legibility at between 6 and 8 points. Small text: For text at small sizes of 8 to 11 points. Body text: For the ideal reading sizes of 11 to 14 points. Subhead: For setting short phrases between 14 to 24 points. Display: For setting large headings above 24 points. Poster: For the text in posters above 36 points.
Trying the beta today for the first time. I noticed when hovering around to read tooltips that the one for 'Position' (superscript/subscript) incorrectly reads, 'Vertical Scale.' (This is the last option in the 'Positioning and Transform' palette.
One thing I'm not seeing yet-and wonder if I just haven't found-would be what Adobe calls the 'Story' palette and the 'Optical Margin Alignment' feature. Is there such functionality in Publisher?
Also, is there a way to change the default increment to a smaller amount so that arrow key nudges for kerning/tracking from the keyboard are more subtle? It's in preferences in Adobe InDesign and I set mine to 5/1,000 of an em instead of Adobe's 25/1,000 default (I think). Great job so far! (I am anxious for a professional InDesign replacement.) Thank you! This is one of the features that is great-far better than ID's weak implementation. It's basically like QXP. But Q's implementation is a bit better in that so-called optical alignment in Q are styles that can simply be attached to any p.style one creates instead of recreating them or basing new styles upon other styles.
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Thanks, Mike. We were expecting the Optical Alignment settings to be defined once, in a base style that all other paragraph styles are based on, and at most tweaked when the font is changed. You should be able to switch them on or off in a derived style without editing the table. Are you needing multiple different tables in a document?
We also have the option to use the settings defined by the font's OpenType features. In an ideal world this would reduce the need to edit the table even further. In practice I couldn't find many fonts that bothered to define optical alignment. We add the support anyway, hoping that font designers would see it and leap to update their fonts to take advantage. Feel free to report if this doesn't work as you'd expect; as I said, it hasn't had a lot of testing.
We're also open to changing the default numbers in the table, if experts disagree with the values we have chosen. (We just copied them from PagePlus.). Thanks, ABC.
We'll add optical alignment for tabstops and accented characters. I think searching the table top-to-bottom gives a more natural priority order, but we'll add new entries at the top, so they are found first and also are easier to spot by humans. Automatic support for italics would be fairly involved.
Italics would affect A differently to W. To get it right would mean looking at the shapes of the letters. We might consider doing this one day, along with automatic optical kerning, but not for some time.
Ideally, the font designer would provide optical alignment via OpenType features. They could get italics right without us needing to do anything. In the mean time you can edit the manual table for styles that apply italic fonts. This is one of the reasons we made it a character attribute rather than a paragraph one, so it could be included with character styles that change font and/or italics.Automatic support for italics would be fairly involved. Italics would affect A differently to W. Dave, am I correct you are using the bounding box to determine what say 10% of a character is for hanging it? Personally, I think that APub's optical margin alignment is better than ID's.
And I am not really seeing the issue as regards italics.but I may be missing something even reading the thread twice. In the screen shot below, APub on top, a screen shot from ID was pasted in. I think ID sticks the bottom serif of the italic A out too far. It's not just about APub being more even compared to the cap W, it's just that A bottom serif looks wrong in ID. I also noticed that if I switch the font being used to Times New Roman, the results are even worse for the cap A in ID (pushes out even further) and in APub are still nicely even (visually, not just measurably). Which then leads me to believe it is either bounding box/LSB dependent in APub and ID just gets it all sorts of wrong. Congrats for implementing optical bounds.
There are indeed very few fonts that have it, but there were also hardly any apps to support them, and there was never a good UI in a font editor that would help people design them. But this may change.
Question: when reading the font, do you check for explicit presence of the 'lfbd' and 'rtbd' features, or do you only check for 'opbd'? (I think 'opbd' is somewhat stupid and not needed — 'lfbd' and 'rtbd' should be sufficient.) We check for 'lfbd' and 'rtbd', and we currently ignore 'opbd' completely.