The goal of many desktop publishers is professional-looking and readable typography. To help you reach this goal, InDesign comes with tools to ensure the best visual spacing between words and characters in your layout. To achieve the best results possible, you can use tracking, kerning and variable character spacing. Rather than decide on word spacing and hyphenation on a line-by-line basis, the InDesign looks ahead and behind several lines to make good line-break decisions across the whole paragraph.
Tracking is the process of loosening or tightening the spacing of a selected text. Kerning is the process of adding or subtracting space between two specific characters. Tracking and kerning are both measured in 1/1000 em, a unit of measure that is relative to the current type size. In a 6-point font, 1 em equals 6 points; in a 10-point font, 1 em equals 10 points.
Follow these steps to track large text in your InDesign documents:
- Create an InDesign document and type a few words
- Select the Text you just typed with the Text Tool
- On the Control palette, change the font to Times New Roman and the Font Size to 84
- Ensure the text you just formatted is still selected
- Find the Tracking area on the Control palette
- Type -10 into the Tracking area and press [return]
The selected text should now be closer together.
- With the text still selected, press the following keyboard shortcuts to change the tracking:
Decrease 20 thousandths em space: [alt] [left arrow key]
Increase 20 thousandths em space: [alt] [right arrow key]
Decrease 100 thousandths em space: [alt] [command] [left arrow key]
Increase 100 thousandths em space: [alt] [command] [right arrow key]
Follow the same steps to track individual letters, except don’t highlight anything. Instead, click between letter pairs to change the spacing between them.
Adobe Cs Indesign
Pros: Better typographic and graphics capabilities than QuarkXPress offers; nest
Adobe Cs Indesign
Pros: Better typographic and graphics capabilities than QuarkXPress offers; nest
Adobe Cs Indesign
Pros: Better typographic and graphics capabilities than QuarkXPress offers; nest