Changing the space between letters
A common technique in advertising copy (and other text whose actual
content need not actually be read) is to alter the space
between the letters (otherwise known as the tracking). As a general
rule, this is a very bad idea: it detracts from legibility, which is
contrary to the principles of typesetting (any respectable font you
might be using should already have optimum tracking built into it).
The great type designer, Eric Gill, is credited with saying “he who
would letterspace lower-case text, would steal sheep”. (The
attribution is probably apocryphal: others are also credited with the
remark. Stealing sheep was, in the 19th century, a capital offence in
Britain.) As the remark suggests, though, letterspacing of upper-case
text is less awful a crime; the technique used also to be used for
emphasis of text set in Fraktur (or similar) fonts.
Straightforward macros (usable, in principle, with any TeX macro
package) may be found in letterspacing (which is the name of
the .tex
file).
A more comprehensive solution is to be found in the soul
package (which is optimised for use with LaTeX, but also works with
Plain TeX). Soul also permits hyphenation of letterspaced text;
Gill’s view of such an activity is not (even apocryphally) recorded.
(Spacing-out forms part of the name of soul; the other half
is described in another question.)
Possibly the ‘ultimate’ in this field is the microtype,
which uses the micro-typography capabilities of current PDFTeX to
provide a \
textls
command, which operates according to parameters
declared in a \
SetTracking
command. Microtype’s
‘tracking’ facility expands the natural spacing font itself, rather
than inserting space between characters. Ordinarily, letter-spacing
will destroy ligatures; however, this is wrong if the font is
of a fraktur style, and the package provides a means of protecting the
ligatures in a letter-spaced text.
- letterspacing.tex
- macros/generic/misc/letterspacing.tex
- microtype.sty
- macros/latex/contrib/microtype (or browse the directory)
- soul.sty
- macros/latex/contrib/soul (or browse the directory)
This question on the Web: http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=letterspace