As tracking affects the spacing between all characters, it won’t take into account specific spacing requirements between particular letters. Tracking may be a quick-fix for line-spacing, but combining tracking with kerning will really lift your typography to a professional standard.Tracking may be simple to do, but professional designers still have a few tricks up their sleeve for making the most of this type technique. * For a linked sequence of text frames selecting the first text frame will apply the tracking settings to the text flowing across all the frames. Measured in thousandths of an em, you can either choose a positive (to increase the spacing) or negative (to decrease) value from the drop-down menu, or type in a numeric value in the text box. The tracking option is indicated by an ‘A V’ symbol with an arrow sitting below, and is found alongside the other most commonly used text formatting options in the Controls or Character panel. Use your Type Tool (T) cursor to either highlight the text or use the Selection Tool (V, Escape) to select the whole text frame *. In InDesign, you can adjust kerning from either the Controls panel running along the top of the workspace or the Character panel (Window > Type & Tables > Character). This pushes all the letters closer together, causing the same number of words to fit onto less lines (which removes the widow ‘eat’). In the second image the tracking has been reduced. Increasing or decreasing tracking has the power to reduce the amount of hyphenation in a paragraph, and banish widows (lone words at the end of a paragraph) and orphans (lone words at the top of a page, which should belong on the previous page). Many designers apply tracking to improve the look of typeset text.Letters and words are more visually distinguished from each other, allowing the eye to process them more easily than if characters were pushed closely together. Firstly, when tracking is increased it can improve the readability of text.Decreasing the tracking makes the words appear more compact, while increasing tracking increases the amount of white space between letters and words, creating a more airy effect.ĭesigners apply tracking for two main reasons: Tracking affects the visual density of a word, phrase or paragraph.

Principle app letter spacing