idea Improve character spacing and halos in exported .aix in ArcGIS Maps for Adobe Creative Cloud Ideas

Improve character spacing and halos in exported .aix

wayfaringrob — Mon, 30 Jan 2023 20:27:34 GMT

I use halos on nearly every map I make. When exporting a map with haloed text, though, they always look something like this:

Here it is in Pro:

It seems that the halo itself is converting fine, but something's happening to the kerning.

In Pro, my character spacing is set to 0%, and the labeling option I am using doesn't even have an option to spread.

They should be 0 in Illustrator, then, too. When I hop over to Illustrator, though, I find that there are wildly different tracking values between characters.

If I select all and set them to 0, it looks fine. Why is the export messing with that? Luckily this map doesn't have that many labels and Illustrator has some good tools for selecting similar text, but it's just a little boggling that Pro is putting out a file that has altered tracking values.

Please improve the conversion of haloed text by keeping the tracking at the value set in Pro.

Re: Improve halo performance in exported .aix

wayfaringrob — Wed, 30 Nov 2022 18:37:42 GMT

Ok, it looks like maybe this happens for labels with any kind of callout? My shields don't have a halo, but they do have a shield callout, and again, they have random tracking values causing them to spread way wider than they should.

Fixed:

Re: Improve halo performance in exported .aix

wayfaringrob — Mon, 05 Jun 2023 19:02:35 GMT

Here is the workaround for those interested: select one of your problem labels, then go to Select > Same > Font Family, Style & Size. Then, in the character window set tracking to 0. Character window can be opened from Window > Type > Character.

However, this does not work if you altered the spacing or if your labeling positioning settings have made it variable.

Re: Improve halo performance in exported .aix

wayfaringrob — Wed, 30 Nov 2022 18:52:09 GMT

Strangely, labels that did have extra character spacing in Pro convert in-line with their halos, but the whole ensemble is inconsistently shifted a bit. You can see that the top line has slightly condensed spacing compared to Pro whereas the bottom line has more spacing.

Pro:

Illustrator:

In this case, I'm unable to fix it since I can't really modify the spacing of the halos easily.

Re: Improve character spacing and halos in exported .aix

wayfaringrob — Mon, 05 Jun 2023 18:51:39 GMT

Hi @MadhuraPhaterpekar - is there any chance that this could be prioritized?

This is nothing short of infuriating that renders the extension useless. I have been wanting to use this for years but have yet to see it work as intended.

Re: Improve character spacing and halos in exported .aix

wayfaringrob — Mon, 05 Jun 2023 18:55:25 GMT

Like, this is a mess.

Re: Improve character spacing and halos in exported .aix

wayfaringrob — Mon, 05 Jun 2023 18:57:31 GMT

Even my legend text, which has no halo whatsoever, is messed up.

Re: Improve character spacing and halos in exported .aix

MadhuraPhaterpekar — Fri, 16 Jun 2023 14:51:38 GMT

Hi @wayfaringrob

Looking into this currently. Could you please confirm the version of plugin, Illustrator version and OS?

Thanks for bringing it to our attention.

Re: Improve character spacing and halos in exported .aix

wayfaringrob — Fri, 16 Jun 2023 17:09:00 GMT

@MadhuraPhaterpekar using the latest of everything, Windows 10.

Re: Improve character spacing and halos in exported .aix

LaineyLe_Blanc1 — Tue, 26 Sep 2023 20:28:06 GMT

Having the same issues with halo'd font from AIX to Illustrator. The halo's and text are shifted or letters missing/cutoff entirely. The only way I've gotten around it is to drag the halo'd font under a raster so that it gets exported as a graphic, but then I lose the editability of the text and compromises having my labels go over all my other data. The other workaround that works most of the time, is to export as a PDF, then open with Illustrator, but that gets rids of all my layer organization and limits editing. But, at least my text looks OK! This was a problem with ArcMap too and it is frustrating that this problem has gotten worse in Pro.

Re: Improve character spacing and halos in exported .aix

LeoDiPierro — Thu, 01 Feb 2024 01:38:29 GMT

I routinely encounter this problem in AIX exports as well. I feel like this really should not be an issue, especially given how long it has been present.

Re: Improve character spacing and halos in exported .aix

wayfaringrob — Thu, 08 Feb 2024 03:46:39 GMT

@LeoDiPierro yes, absolutely ridiculous. I don't know how this stuff passes out of quality control. @MadhuraPhaterpekar updates?

Re: Improve character spacing and halos in exported .aix

JamesPoeschel — Wed, 14 Feb 2024 19:12:35 GMT

I am also looking forward to this issue being solved

Re: Improve character spacing and halos in exported .aix

wayfaringrob — Thu, 15 Feb 2024 00:18:34 GMT

I'll reiterate that this issue alone makes Maps for Adobe a non-starter, yet it's been over 6 years since release. I hate to see the company let yet another buggy product languish. It impacts us all.

Re: Improve character spacing and halos in exported .aix

MadhuraPhaterpekar — Mon, 23 Sep 2024 23:37:27 GMT

(Updated 9/23/2024: Added workaround #2)
Thanks to the community for raising this back to our attention. We looked into this and below is a summary of our findings:
- The issue appears to be related to Adobe Illustrator's font-rendering engine and how it processes text from other programs like ArcGIS. We find this is not unique to AIX export workflow, and PDF exports also exhibit the broken tracking problem in Illustrator only. Additionally, we find Adobe Acrobat does not alter text tracking like Illustrator does. Its worth noting that SVG exports are not impacted and retain text appearance/ tracking well, however characters are separated and could impact edibility.
- The fonts used seems to have a role. Its reproducible with certain fonts consistently - when used with labels or annotations, with or without halos.
- This issue isn't related to halos, as we were able to replicate it with non-haloed text as well.
- There are 2 known workarounds for this issue
1. Workaround in the original post works well for AIX workflows. In some of our tests we found re-typing '0' in the tracking input box yields consistent results, as selecting '0' from dropdown does not always work.
2. If the desired font is locally available and accessible to Illustrator, then before exporting to AIX in ArcGIS Pro turn OFF the setting to Embed Fonts.
For these reasons, this issue cannot be addressed in ArcGIS alone and we will need to work with Adobe to gain more insight.

From our end, we have reached out to Adobe Illustrator community in this related post for clarifications of this behaviour. In the meantime, we will continue to leave this idea open for additional insight.

Thanks to all who have responded and shared their observations. If anyone has additional info, please feel free to share here.

Thank you,
ArcGIS Maps for Adobe team.

Re: Improve character spacing and halos in exported .aix - Status changed to: Under Consideration

MadhuraPhaterpekar — Wed, 06 Mar 2024 21:10:05 GMT

Looking into clarifications with Adobe. In the meantime we encourage this community to continue voting and sharing feedback which will help teams gauge user demand.

Thank you,
ArcGIS Maps for Adobe Creative Cloud team.

Re: Improve character spacing and halos in exported .aix

BRENNEJM — Tue, 23 Jul 2024 15:29:23 GMT

@MadhuraPhaterpekarI'm having a similar issue with PDF exports, but not related at all to Illustrator. See below. I have letter spacing set in ArcGIS Pro, but after exporting to a PDF the letter spacing has changed.

In PDF:

In Pro:

EDIT: The font I'm using is Alright Sans. After some more testing, the letter spacing works as expected in the PDF if I'm using Alright Sans Regular, but causes the above error if I'm using Alright Sans Bold.

Re: Improve character spacing and halos in exported .aix

MadhuraPhaterpekar — Mon, 23 Sep 2024 23:36:54 GMT

Hello and Thank you for sharing your examples in this idea. The team continues to investigate it. A new workaround was recently added to this comment. Hope this helps while a resolution is reached.

Re: Improve character spacing and halos in exported .aix

wayfaringrob — Tue, 24 Sep 2024 03:40:26 GMT

@MadhuraPhaterpekar thank you, these are helpful nuances!