At the Type tool's caret, kerning goes on the character before the caret.
At the start of the text there is none, so Alt+arrows, the Kerning field
and Reset Tracking and Kerning did nothing; at a later paragraph's start
the kerning landed on the invisible line break.
CharStyle::kerning_before (kerningBefore) is the space before a character
that starts a line by itself: the first character of the text, of a
paragraph, or after a forced line break. Shaping gives its cluster the
space and draws it that much later along the line (right to left the
space is at its right; in vertical type it moves down the column). The
caret at such a line's start sets it (edit::caret_kerning_target), in
type.step, type.resetTracking and the Character panel; text.setRangeStyle
takes it. SVG export starts the line where the character is drawn. The
Eyedropper and character styles leave it alone.
Ctrl/Alt+arrows and double-click treated a run of Thai (Lao, Khmer,
Myanmar) without spaces as one word, and stopped at a word's tone and
vowel marks, which didn't count as part of a word. They now stop at the
word boundaries the line segmenter finds in those scripts (shared with
line breaking, so no more data ships), and combining marks count as
part of a word, also for combining accents in other scripts.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The Type tool's Left and Right arrows and Delete moved one code point at
a time, so the caret could stop between a Thai consonant and its vowel
or tone marks (or inside an accented letter or emoji sequence), where
typing or deleting splits the cluster. They now step over extended
grapheme clusters. Backspace still takes back one character at a time,
as Thai typists expect for a mistyped tone mark.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Document symbols placed inline in a run of type (beyond Illustrator; like
InDesign inline anchored objects): TextRun.inline holds the symbol, scale and
shift; the run is one U+FFFC laid out as a glyph sized to the art, centred on
the cap height. text.insertInline and Type > Insert Inline Symbol; editing
keeps the graphic whole; canvas, SVG (<use>) and PDF draw the art; Create
Outlines turns it into a symbol instance.
Sven Lafebre