possible bug Variable text gets bigger in Acrobat if marked as variable text in Indesign

[marcusm]

I have big problem. Im using Indesign documents when I start to make my variable templates.

 

I mark the text I want variable and export to Acrobat to work with FusionPro. The problem is that if the Indesign document used has some settings on the text (like spacing and other textadjustments), FusionPro don't use these settings in Acrobat. The textspacing gets very bad and I have to adjust every variable template I work with every single time to adjust the spacing. This takes alot of time when you work with 40 templates a week.

 

Sometimes when I export text from Indesign FusionPro marks the variabletextfield as to big, even though the size of the text fits nice in Indesign before Export.

[Alex Marshall]

Unfortunately, tracking is one of those features of typography that

is not standardized between various computerized text layout

engines. (And tracking and kerning are often confused.) See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracking_%28typography%29#Varying_systems_of_letter-spacing

Therefore, I can't give you an exact formula for translating tracking

values between QuarkXPress and FusionPro because they both calculate

tracking differently, and I don't have access to Quark's internal

tracking algorithm. Nor do I have access to Adobe's tracking

algorithm for InDesign. The only thing I could do to come up with an

approximate translation is to fiddle with the settings in both

applications, but you should be be able to do that yourself.

If you want all of the text in your FusionPro output to look exactly

the same in terms of typographical details such as tracking, word

spacing, and leading, then my recommendation is to export all the

text frames from your QuarkXPress or InDesign template as variable

and let FusionPro compose everything. It's unlikely that composing a

bit more text would slow down the composition substantially, but if

that's an issue, you could always compose the "static" parts to PDF

first using FusionPro, then use the resulting output PDF as the

background for your variable data composition.

[marcusm]

Ok. I see the problem. We often have problem with the fonts not displaying the same in Indesign and FusionPro. I think there should be some more options ins fusionPro for the text editor so you can adjust your text like you do in Indesign.

 

If FusionPro cannot carry over all information from Indesign there should at least be options in FusionPro Text editor to correct the fontproblems you get when you export to Acrobat and FusionPro.

 

Is there any plans to develop the text editor functions in future releases?

[Alex Marshall]

Unfortunately, there is no setting to make FusionPro exactly replicate text composition from Quark or InDesign. The thing you have to keep in mind is that FusionPro composes, or flows, text differently than QuarkXPress and InDesign do. And QuarkXPress and InDesign compose differently than each other. Neither Printable nor Quark nor Adobe have access to each others' text compositions algorithms to exactly replicate any of the other companies' text composition engines. In addition, there isn't really one "right" way of composing text; in fact, there's no universal standard or agreement on the "right" way to handle things like kerning, leading, word breaking, and countless other text composition details.

 

So, if you have text that you're exporting from Quark or InDesign, and you make it variable, FusionPro will compose it based on a completely different set of rules than the source design tool. This is why we provide Preview functionality, so that you can see how your text will flow when it's composed by FusionPro. We do try to export as many properties of the text as we can so that we can get it as close as possible to the original, but it's never going to completely match, and there are some advanced composition features in Quark and InDesign that we simply don't support.