Adobe Illustrator Fit Type Bounding Box by Excluding Side Bearing

Question

I am facing a little confusion regarding how the bounding box around text behaves in Adobe Illustrator.

I would like to align multiple text boxes by snapping along a vertical guide.

I noticed there is a space/offset between the actual text content and the left and right edges of the bounding box due to the glyph/character's side bearings. The larger the character size, the larger the "space" is.

(please note the areas highlighted in yellow in the image below).

With this behavior, if I align all text boxes along the guide, although their respective bounding boxes are all aligned and snap into place, the varying side bearing (relative to the character size) of the text makes it seem as if they are not aligned and the text does not appear flush against the guide (this is more prominent on larger font sizes).

There are two workarounds I can think of:

a) Convert the type to outlines, so that the bounding box fits the exact width of the text. This is not an ideal solution since text can no longer be edited.

b) Disable the guide/grid snapping and manually align each text box. Again this does not sound like an ideal solution.

Considering the wide spread use of Adobe Illustrator for print and typography specific designs, I find this behavior counter intuitive and difficult to work with.

I was wondering how others tackle this issue and if there might be a better way to precisely align type of varying font sizes / glyph side bearings.

Thanking you,

Answer 1

Some background

The visible bearing at the start of the line is a side-effect of how digital typography works. In traditional typesetting, lining up the left edge of a typeface was standard practice because, as you've discovered, misaligned left edges can look bad under certain circumstances. When digital desktop publishing became the norm, this tidy visual nicety was sacrificed for the speed and ease of digital software. Why? Because making things look aligned is more complicated than just ignoring the left-bearing on the first character in a line. Certain stacked characters (T and L, for instance) may be accurately lined up without the lead bearing, but will still look off-balance because the combination of character shapes don't have the same visual balance. There's a lot of art that goes into getting things to look balanced which makes it difficult to accomplish automatically. As a result, even "easy" alignment cases such as yours don't get solved.

Modern applications have begun trying to fix this with a feature called optical margin alignment, where the software tries to balance out the characters with some math-magic. Unfortunately, Illustrator isn't intended for typesetting. This is reflected in its very poor OMA feature. I can completely guarantee it won't work well for you here. (If you were using InDesign you'd get very good results. Select the text box and go to the type menu, and select the "story" option. Click the checkbox in the panel that opens and start tweaking the value in the other box until it looks how you want it to.)

The fix

There's a finicky work-around you can use instead: manually kerning the first character of each line. It's a soft-adjustment to the text properties that will enable you to keep the objects snapped to the grid, while achieving the same effect as disabling snapping and making manual adjustments to each box.

1. Open the character panel (Window > Type > Character)
2. Place the cursor before the first character in the line
3. Tweak the kerning up or down 1 by 1 until they line up how you like (the kern option is the V/A icon with a left-arrow under only the A.)
4. Each line is going to require a different amount of adjustment, so be patient.

Before and After: