Listen to your eyes
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By Robin Williams for Layers Magazine
Excellent letter spacing isn’t the sexiest thing Adobe® InDesign® CS2 can do, but it makes the difference between good type and great type, and it displays the difference between a good designer and a great designer. Inappropriate or unconscious letter spacing can make type difficult to read, difficult to comprehend, and difficult to respect.
There’s no formulaic method for adjusting the spaces between letters—it’s entirely dependent on the typeface, type size, paper, color of ink, and the purpose of the piece. Your eyes make the final judgment: They know if the spacing is uneven, too tight, or too loose. Listen to your eyes and know how to control your software.
Examples of good and bad kerning.
InDesign has controls for kerning, tracking, letter spacing, and word spacing, and all of these individual controls are affected by the justification, hyphenation, and composition settings. We’ll start at the most intimate level and move up to the most global but first let’s look at the preference that controls kerning values. Change this preference while no document is open on your screen and it will set the value as the default for all new documents.
From the InDesign menu (PC: Edit menu), choose Preferences > Units & Increments. You’ll notice that the default Kerning value is 20/1000 em. This means that if you take the point size of the type (called an em), say 24-point, and divide it into 1000 parts, each default kerning space is 20/1000, which is way too much. Let’s change Kerning to 5 units and click OK.
Adjust kerning in the InDesign Preferences dialog box.
The lowest common denominator
Certain pairs of letters always need kerning, such as “To” or “Va.” A well-designed face has the kerning built into the font metrics so that when you type certain character combinations, they tuck into each other nicely. These typefaces include a number of these “kern pairs.” In fact, a font might have anywhere from 50 to several thousand kern pairs.
InDesign applies these kern pairs by default, as you can tell by the Kerning field in the Character palette, which typically says “Metrics.” This means that it’s using the font metrics and applying the kerning value built into the font. That’s why, when you click the insertion point between two characters, this same Kerning field displays a number in parentheses—that’s the kerning value of the auto pair. (That’s also why type automatically looks better in InDesign than it does in most word processors, which don’t usually apply the kern pairs.)
The Metrics option in the Kerning field of the Character palette.
If you use a typeface that doesn’t have built-in kern pairs, or if you use a combination of fonts, styles, or sizes, that’s when you want to use the Optical option in the Kerning field. Optical looks at the shapes of the letters and tries to adjust them as well as it can—without eyes.
The Optical option in the Kerning field of the Character palette.
Manual kerning
What we mean by manual kerning is adjusting the space between two characters, which is the most important letter-spacing feature as it’s the only one dependent on your eyes. Manual kerning is what you’ll use to fine-tune your text after all other options have been adjusted.
When you use keyboard shortcuts to kern, InDesign applies the amount that you set in the Preferences dialog box at the beginning of this article. Say, for example, when you’re using the Type tool in InDesign, if you place the insertion point between two characters and use the keyboard shortcut Option-Left Arrow (PC: Alt-Left Arrow), each tap of the left arrow removes 5/1000 em. Option-Right Arrow (PC: Alt-Right Arrow) increases the space 5/1000 em.
If you hold down the Command key in addition to the Option and Arrow keys (PC: Ctrl-Alt-Arrow key) to remove or increase the kerning, this will remove or increase 25/1000 em instead of 5/1000.
Any manual kerning you apply is added to the kern pair that might be built into the two characters. The Kerning field then displays the total amount of the kern pair and any manual kerning you apply.
Note: The kerning value is always applied to the character to the left of the insertion point. You can copy-and-paste that character and the kerning value will go with it. If you delete the character, then the character and kerning are deleted.
Tracking
Adjusting the space between a selected range of characters is called “tracking.” Instead of applying an individual amount between a pair of letters, tracking applies the same amount to all of the characters that are selected. Because tracking doesn’t take into account the shapes of the letters, it’s really only useful to get a start on adjusting the space—you’ll still need to fine-tune with manual kerning.
Any tracking you apply is added to the manual kerning and to the kern pairs. That’s why you might select an entire word and apply one value of tracking, but when you click between two characters in that same word, the Kerning field displays a different value. But the tracking value doesn’t affect the kerning value! You can manually kern between individual characters until they’re visually consistent, then apply tracking, and everything will tighten or loosen proportionally.
You can use the same keyboard shortcuts for tracking as we did for kerning above, except that to track, you must first select a range of text.
To remove all kerning and tracking (but not the kern pairs), select the text and hit Command-Option-Q (PC: Ctrl-Alt-Q).
To remove the kern pairs, select the text and choose 0 (zero) in the Kerning field in the Character palette.
Paragraph-specific letter spacing
The kerning and tracking values are character-specific—meaning that you can apply them to selected characters. Sometimes, however, you may want to open up the letter spacing in an entire paragraph of text, a story, or an entire document.
Because letter spacing doesn’t take into consideration any tracking, kerning, or kern-pair values, it’s the fastest and most processor-efficient way for InDesign to adjust the space between lots of characters. This is the feature you want to use if you have a lot of text to open up or tighten. You won’t see the paragraph letter-spacing value reflected in the Tracking or Kerning fields.
To adjust the paragraph letter spacing, use the Justification dialog in either your Paragraph Style Options or from the Paragraph palette (or Command-Option-Shift-J [PC: Ctrl-Alt-Shift-J]). We’re only going to use the first two columns of specs in this dialog—Word Spacing and Letter Spacing.
Adjust paragraph letter spacing in the Justification dialog box.
Two things to remember about these specs are:
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The Minimum and Maximum amounts only apply if you justify the text; that is, flush right or flush left text will ignore whatever is in those fields.
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The Desired amount must be a percentage between the Minimum and Maximum; so, if you want to change the Desired Letter Spacing to 25%, you must first change the Maximum to 25% or more.
Just as with kern pairs, the typeface designer has built into the font the amount of space on each side of the character, particularly the right side, or the “pen advance.” The percentages that you enter in the Justification dialog are how much you want to deviate from the amount that’s built into the font metrics.
You probably know that the smaller the type size, the more letter spacing it needs proportionally, and the larger the type, the less letter spacing it needs. So let’s say you have a large block of small type and you want to open up the space a little. You could do it with tracking, but it will be faster and more efficient to use the paragraph letter spacing. Here’s how:
Select the text. Now, in the Justification dialog, first enter an amount in the Letter Spacing Maximum field. If your text is justified, enter the percentage amount by which you want to increase the spacing, and enter that same amount in the Desired field. If your text isn’t justified, enter any amount in the Maximum field, then enter your desired increase in the Desired field.
If you’re working with large type that needs less letter spacing, you can enter negative numbers in the Minimum and Desired fields.
Paragraph-specific word spacing
The Word Spacing in the Justification dialog works the same as Letter Spacing: The designer has built into the font metrics the “space band,” or the amount of space that appears on the page when you hit the Spacebar. You can deviate from this amount by a desired percentage. In fact, sometimes I open up the word spacing just a wee bit for clarity.
Here are some great keyboard shortcuts for manually kerning just the space bands between two words (be sure to select the space first):
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To add space: Command-Option-\ (PC: Ctrl-Alt-\)
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To delete space: Command-Option-Delete (PC: Ctrl-Alt-Backspace)
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To add increments in multiples of 5: Add the Shift key to the above shortcuts.
For paragraph-specific word spacing, select the entire paragraph and use the shortcuts above.
But wait—there’s more!
Now, after all the work you put into adjusting the kerning, tracking, and letter spacing of your type, your carefully chosen specs are further influenced by the hyphenation controls you set and the composing method you choose. And InDesign can’t always do what you want, especially if you justify the text…but that’s another story. For now, become familiar with the manual kerning, manual tracking, and automatic letter spacing features. Know when and why to use each one and how to have complete control over them. And listen to your eyes.
Robin Williams is author of more than a dozen best-selling books, including The Little Mac Book, The Non-Designer’s Type Book, and The Non-Designer’s Design Book. She has also taught traditional and electronic typography for more than 20 years. Her soon-to-be-released works include Robin Williams Cool Mac Apps, 2nd Edition; The Little Mac Book, Tiger Edition; and the Non-Designer’s Type Book, 2nd Edition.
