Kerning pairs I hear are a pain in the arse in True Type, actually…I’ve heard that they aren’t supported much in True Type format at all. Some pros would be able to help you better, but I’d say just focus on metrics.

Hmmm. I just tried typing “AVATAR” in Times New Roman instead, and you appear to be correct. I get the same results for Type 1, though. And those are the only formats TypeTool exports. Is the whole kerning feature in this program just meant to be practice for FontLab?

What apps, on what platform? In Word you need to turn kerning on.

Cheers, Si

Aha. Thank you. Microsoft sure does make all those little options hard to find, don’t they? (I don’t use Word very often, but CorelDraw only uses TTF…)

Which version of CorelDraw? v3? CorelDraw has shipped with, and used, Type 1 fonts for at least ten years now.

6. I’m stingy, and I like to hold onto a version that works. It seems to me that there comes a point when a company decides that their industry isn’t selling enough how-to books and training classes, so they rearrange the interface of each new upgrade to be as complex, nonsensical, and counterintuitive as possible.

For raster work, I use and love Paint Shop Pro 5. I tried out 7 once, and found that I would be paying to give up the ability to draw a straight line on a flat layer. The line tool now makes a new layer containing a vector line each time you use it. In fact, everything you do becomes a separate layer until memory runs out. So convenient! I wiped it and treasure my 5 disc like gold.

I once imported a book I laid out in CorelDraw 6 into CorelDraw 8 on someone else’s computer to prepare it for print. Turns out that they defined an RGB equivalent for 100% black that’s like #050108 or something, to reflect that the fact that 100% of all four CMYK is darker. WYSIWYG, you know. Except “what you get” is a PDF where all the black has turned into a 95% screen. Took me a while to figure out what was wrong and what I had to do. I shudder to think what even later versions were like.

If software companies want any more of my money, they’ve got to stop breaking their product.

v6 for the Mac or PC? v6 for the PC was an utter disaster — it had a tendency to crash JUST as you were trying to save a file, which is pretty inconvenient unless you like doing the same work over and over again. However, I do agree that, as a rule, Corel has managed to break more things than it has fixed along the way. WordPerfect 8 is the last reliable version of that software that they produced, and CorelDraw 9 is much better in MANY ways than the subsequent three versions.

Well, it never crashes like that for me, but then, I’m running it on a more powerful PC than the ones that existed when it came out, and WinXP is much more stable than Win95.

True…it could well be that the fatal combination was v6 and Win 95. After my bad experiences with that combination, I never went back to v6 with another operating system to see if it behaved any differently. If it works for you, that’s all that matters.