Tracking, or ‘character spacing’, explained
by Arthur
Posted on Monday, January 9th, 2006 at 9:08 pm CET
There are two ways to change the spacing between characters when doing digital typography, and programs like Microsoft Word and Adobe Photoshop use different units and methods to do this. The official word for defining the space between all characters in a text is tracking, not to be confused with kerning.
Definitions
- Kerning increases or decreases the space between two particular letters (Figure A). Most fonts have built-in kerning tables that control the space between letters. Kerning is especially useful for big headlines, to move certain letters closer together to maintain consistent spacing.
- Tracking uniformly increases or decreases the space between three or more letters (Figure B). Tracking is used to change the overall tightness of a block of text.
Tracking methods
In some software applications the units you enter to increase or decrease the tracking is relative to the font size, but in other programs it isn’t. To illustrate this I will show how tracking works in Adobe Photoshop, and then in Microsoft Word.
The highlighted text in the above example in Photoshop has been set to a tracking of 200 (see the orange box in the character palette). But what does “200″ mean? Well, each tracking unit in Photoshop is actually 1/1000th em (see definition of ‘em’), or 1/1000th of the font size. In Adobe Illustrator the default value is 20/1000 and unlike Photoshop it can be changed under settings.
So the value 200 is actually 0.2em, or one-fifth of the font size. As you can see the font is 15px, so the space between the characters is 3px (one fifth of 15).
This is relative tracking, because the bigger you make the font the bigger the space between the letters will be. If you were to change the font size to 100px then the space between the characters will grow to 20px.
That’s not how it works in Microsoft Word however. In Word tracking is called character spacing and it is not relative. Instead of entering a value proportional to the size of the font, you need to enter a value in points. If you want to get the same effect as in Photoshop, you need to take one-fifth of the font size.
In the example above we have set the tracking to 3pt (see orange box) for a font of 15pt. If you would change the font to 100pt then you need to manually change the tracking to 20pt to maintain the same spacing.
It is important to understand when which method is used if you want to replicate a certain text in a different program: relative, or absolute. Read more about tracking on Wikipedia
There are two ways to change the spacing between characters when doing digital typography, and programs like Microsoft Word and Adobe Photoshop use different units and methods to do this. The official word for defining the space between all characters in a text is tracking, not to be confused with kerning.
Definitions
- Kerning increases or decreases the space between two particular letters (Figure A). Most fonts have built-in kerning tables that control the space between letters. Kerning is especially useful for big headlines, to move certain letters closer together to maintain consistent spacing.
- Tracking uniformly increases or decreases the space between three or more letters (Figure B). Tracking is used to change the overall tightness of a block of text.
Tracking methods
In some software applications the units you enter to increase or decrease the tracking is relative to the font size, but in other programs it isn’t. To illustrate this I will show how tracking works in Adobe Photoshop, and then in Microsoft Word.
The highlighted text in the above example in Photoshop has been set to a tracking of 200 (see the orange box in the character palette). But what does “200″ mean? Well, each tracking unit in Photoshop is actually 1/1000th em (see definition of ‘em’), or 1/1000th of the font size. In Adobe Illustrator the default value is 20/1000 and unlike Photoshop it can be changed under settings.
So the value 200 is actually 0.2em, or one-fifth of the font size. As you can see the font is 15px, so the space between the characters is 3px (one fifth of 15).
This is relative tracking, because the bigger you make the font the bigger the space between the letters will be. If you were to change the font size to 100px then the space between the characters will grow to 20px.
That’s not how it works in Microsoft Word however. In Word tracking is called character spacing and it is not relative. Instead of entering a value proportional to the size of the font, you need to enter a value in points. If you want to get the same effect as in Photoshop, you need to take one-fifth of the font size.
In the example above we have set the tracking to 3pt (see orange box) for a font of 15pt. If you would change the font to 100pt then you need to manually change the tracking to 20pt to maintain the same spacing.
It is important to understand when which method is used if you want to replicate a certain text in a different program: relative, or absolute. Read more about tracking on Wikipedia
