The type panels in Vectornation by Zaweba explained

Good typography comes from many small decisions about size, spacing, alignment and letterforms. In Vectornation by Zaweba those decisions live in four panels: Character, Paragraph, OpenType and Glyphs. Alongside them are character and paragraph styles, styling for any range of text you select, and kerning taken from the font's own GPOS data.

Character and Paragraph

The Character panel sets the look of letters: font, size and the other settings that apply to characters. Because styling can be applied per range, you can select a single word in a paragraph and change it without affecting the rest.

The Paragraph panel sets how blocks of text behave: alignment, indents, spacing and the other settings that apply to whole paragraphs. Select anywhere in a paragraph and its settings apply to the whole thing.

A simple way to remember the difference is that characters are about letters and paragraphs are about blocks.

OpenType features and glyphs

Most modern fonts include extra features beyond the basic letters: ligatures, alternative letterforms, old style figures, small capitals and more, depending on the font. The OpenType panel lets you turn these on and off. Not every font has every feature, so the panel is also a quick way to find out what a font offers.

These features are worth exploring for headings and logos, where an alternate letter or a ligature can make a wordmark distinctive without drawing anything by hand.

The Glyphs panel shows every character in a font, including symbols and letters you cannot easily type on a keyboard. Use it for accented letters, arrows, fractions, ornaments and special punctuation. Inserting from the panel puts the real character into live text, so it stays editable.

Styles

Character styles and paragraph styles save a set of formatting under a name. Apply the style and the text takes on all its settings at once. Change the style and every piece of text using it updates.

For anything longer than a poster, styles save a great deal of time. A brochure with twelve headings and a few dozen captions stays consistent, and a late request to change the heading font becomes one edit instead of many.

Kerning from the font

Kerning adjusts the space between particular pairs of letters so they look evenly spaced. Vectornation reads kerning from the font's GPOS table, which is where well made OpenType fonts keep their kerning. The result is that text looks as the type designer intended, without you having to adjust pairs by hand.

For large display type you may still want to adjust a pair or two by eye, but starting from the font's own kerning gives a much better base.

Font menus in Vectornation show each family in its own font. Scrolling the list becomes a quick visual browse, and you can spot the right style without trying each one on your text.

Small typographic habits

Set up styles early, even for small jobs. Use OpenType features rather than faking small caps or fractions by scaling ordinary letters. Look at headings at their real size before fussing over kerning. And keep text live for as long as you can, so these panels stay useful right to the end of the job.