We let our subscription lapse for that same reason. Sparkol has been promising to address this for well over a year. Clearly, they have other "priorities." As far as I can tell they have made no effort to remedy this, only excuses and "workarounds."

At times the spacing issues are so bad it looks like there is a full space between letters! V after A seems to be horrendous regardless of what typeface I use.

Any progress on this? We're new to the whiteboard animation field and trying out the free one week trial. I like the simple intuitive nature on Videoscribe but even my wife commented on the kerning issue. Seems like a no-brainer for Videoscribe to focus on is at least with their "basic" font. (I'd be happy with this.)

Time marches on and another year has slipped by and apparently no Kerning fix will be coming for a looong time :(

So for those of us that need to use scripts, what fonts can Sparkol recommend?

Help please!

Almost another year anniversary since my last comment on this. This will NEVER be solved because not enough people have mentioned it to push it to the top of their priority list. Come on folks, it's been over 2 years. It ain't gonna' get fixed. LMAO! 

This has been requested innumerable times.

As often, Sparkol has acknowledged and told us a major revisit and solution was under development.

It hasn't come, probably for the same reasons other big, promised changes haven't come yet. When their roadmap has the resources and answers, we'll see a big upgrade. I expected it in this release, which is all cosmetics.

In spite of the promises and timetable, we'll get these changes when we get them ... it is what it is.

Sorry Sparkol but its a pitty and a little shame to read the first question for this ugly kerning-letter space on Mon, 23 Feb, 2015. After 3 Years nothing it`s happend and this ist the f... reason why I won´t buy a this software.

Just a reminder:
If you just want to vent, this is a good thread for that. However venting in THIS thread does not help to make the kerning feature a priority. If you think kerning should be a priority, use the link provided by Barry earlier in this thread to go to the feature request thread for this topic, and click the "Do you LIKE this idea" link in the first post of that thread.  That is how the development team gauges user interest in new features.

-Mike (videoscribe user)

 

Hello David, we do appreciate your frustration! As Mike said the Kerning feature request is the place to push for this as Likes on the original post there is an official show of support and monitored by our product teams. We are in the planning stages v4 of VideoScribe now that v3 is out there and that is likely to be a feature-heavy release now the UI and searching has been addressed in v3. Obviously, at this stage we cannot give any cast iron guarantees on what we will be included but the popular font and audio issues are all being discussed.

In my experiences working as a systems engineer, there are always multiple ways to address application shortcomings.  At a minimum, we can:

1. Design and implement new software features to enhance functionality

2. Research various workarounds and have our support staff detail easy to implement end-user steps to address their needs

In the case of the font kerning problem, I think we would all agree that it would not be realistic to expect the end-user to essentially bit-map each text character.  Yet since this problem can at least be mitigated by careful font type selection (some are far worse than others), it would seem to be a simple matter for Sparkol subject matter experts to do some research, document and freely share which font types are recommended (which I have previously suggested but apparently fell on deaf ears.  

Better yet, for common recurring problems, producing a Sparkol video to actually demonstrate HOW-TO elegantly address the problem would be a real slam-dunk!  But to instead say, "Mañana, maybe we will address issues in a future release..." does not enhance the customer's image of a company's dedication to excellence.

At least from an end-users perspective, it's difficult to understand why Sparkol developers and support staff can't come together and develop a simple workaround. As it is now, in the face of the end-user's project deadline, it's up to each user to discover the problem themselves, research various font types on their own and after hours of frustration, settle for a font type that isn't too bad.

I think we will all agree that over the years, happy REPEAT customers learn which companies provide good products or at least workable products with great customer service.  For instance, Apple's success is in part attributable to following the Pareto principle, providing 80 percent of the features and functionality for 80 percent of their target audience (successful companies can't keep everyone happy all of the time, but 80 percent will make a world-class company).  

So in the recent case of aging iPhone batteries that are stressed by new software features, they initially modify the software to slow down the aging iPhones to avoid crashes (generating bad Press), but ultimately realize their image is at stake and provide everyone new replacement batteries at cost. Here's a classic example of how customer support and product development listen to customer's product problems, coming together to keep happy, repeat customers.

Happy New Year,

Michael

Thanks Michael,

I am going to create a help article containing a brief overview of the issues with fonts and a list of fonts that we recommend using to avoid or reduce the effects of these issues. If you, or anyone else, have any ideas or recommendations for things to include and cover in the article, please let me know.

The following workaround is one of the things I will put in the article which may help with the issue for some people until it's fixed in the software:

One thing you can do to overcome this spacing issue with proportional fonts is to create a separate text element for a single character that might have a large gap. For example, you could have the W in the word WATER as a separate element and then another element for the rest of the word (or 3 separate elements if the spacing issue is in the middle of a word).

To get the text to be the same size, you can copy and paste one text element to create a duplicate and then edit the text of the copy and move the second text element into position.

The font used in the above screenshot is Times New Roman which is a proportional font. I have found that using a monospaced font will give the best results in VideoScribe. 

Some examples of monospaced fonts are:

• Andale Mono
  
• Courier
  
• Consolas
  
• Lucida Console
  
• Monaco
  
• Prestige Elite
  
• Rockwell
  

The new help article regarding fonts and kerning is now available.

Font Kerning