Text Rendering between InDesign and Illustrator

Tiffany Wardle

Recently I was reviewing a typeface and came to realize that problems I was finding in Illustrator (CS6) were not found in InDesign (CS6). Specifically some letters were overlapping too much in Illustrator but not in InDesign. Ideas? Articles already available on this topic?

(Couldn’t decide where this belongs. Correct me if it should be elsewhere.)

Chris Lozos

I have noticed rendering differences between Ai and InD.  It appears to be screen rendering differences.  Sometimes I get the impression that the 2 products deal with units in type differently.  The same UPM in both but somehow it looks like there are rounding differences between the two.  InD always looks better than Ai to me.  It looks better in InD when I  select Display performance>high quality Display.  I don't know what is going on.

kupfers

{hat sich erledigt}

Chris Lozos

How has it been dealt with, Indra?

Stephen Coles

There was a misunderstanding about the forum’s “announcement” feature. Cleared it up.

Thomas Phinney

Tiffany, I think technically this is not a rendering issue, but a text layout issue. The reason this matters is that Illustrator and InDesign use the same rendering engine (CoolType), but different text layout engines.

Tiffany Wardle

@Thomas Phinney It seems I need a primer in this. Is there a novice entry point for understanding the two?

Thomas Phinney

Hmmm. Probably? But I don't know what to point you at. I will give a shot at some definitions, and maybe somebody else can correct or clarify.

A rendering engine does the actual font rasterization. Based on the font outlines and hinting, it decides what pixels to turn on, including any fancy sub-pixel action (like ClearType).

A text layout engine takes strings of characters, figures out what glyphs to use to represent those strings (*), and takes the rendered glyphs from the rendering engine and positions them.

* In the case of Adobe architectures, Adobe CoolType is a rendering engine but also supports the layout engines by providing the guts of this second function.

InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop all use CoolType for rendering and to get their low-level OpenType support, but InDesign has its own layout engine. Illustrator and Photoshop use a shared layout engine, ATE.

Igor Petrovic

Bumping this old thread, with this screenshot. Not sure if the image shows the difference after upload, but the text looks smoother in InDesign than in Illustrator. Also, the same size at 100% zoom looks smaller in InDesign.

Illustrator in general tends to show text a bit jaggy (yet export/print/outlined text is fine at the end). Also, Photoshop has a "smooth" anti-aliasing setting, Illustrator doesn't have it, while InDesign has no AA options for text at all. 

1. Does a smoother view mean that InDesign is more suitable for checking hinting results?

2. Are there anti-aliasing options for text in InDesign?

3. Does this effect has to do with document setup (72dpi vs 300dpi, I tested Illustrator setting raster effects at 300dpi but it looks the same). Is an absolute smaller size also related to this or something else?

Also another related effect in MS Word. Seems that the fake bold effect looks jaggy here and there on unhinted font, while it looks ok in hinted. Is it worth to autohint the font only to avoid this? I am asking this because otherwise, I am not sure do I like more unhinted or autohinted version and the typeface is display anyway.

Michael Rafailyk

@Igor Petrovic
An issue with 100% size difference in Illustrator is located here:

Igor Petrovic

In the meantime I found a recommendation (in this Glyphs article) to use InDesign for testing hinting results and an especially useful tip for zooming pixels.

Zooming pixels can also be used on Windows. The feature is called Magnifier, smoothing can be turned off as well. More info on THIS link.