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<head>
<title>UK TeX FAQ -- question label letterspace</title>
</head><body>
<h3>Changing the space between letters</h3>
<p/>A common technique in advertising copy (and other text whose actual
content need not actually be <em>read</em>) 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).
<p/>The great type designer, Eric Gill, is credited with saying &#8220;he who
would letterspace lower-case text, would steal sheep&#8221;.  (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.
<p/>Straightforward macros (usable, in principle, with any TeX macro
package) may be found in <i>letterspacing</i> (which is the name of
the <code>.tex</code> file).
<p/>

<p/>A more comprehensive solution is to be found in the <i>soul</i>
package (which is optimised for use with LaTeX, but also works with
Plain TeX).  Soul also permits hyphenation of letterspaced text;
Gill&#8217;s view of such an activity is not (even apocryphally) recorded.
(Spacing-out forms part of the name of <i>soul</i>; the other half
is described in <a href="FAQ-underline.html">another question</a>.)
<p/>Possibly the &#8216;ultimate&#8217; in this field is the <i>microtype</i>,
which uses the micro-typography capabilities of current PDFTeX to
provide a <code>\</code><code>textls</code> command, which operates according to parameters
declared in a <code>\</code><code>SetTracking</code> command.  <i>Microtype</i>&#8217;s
&#8216;tracking&#8217; facility expands the natural spacing font itself, rather
than inserting space between characters.  Ordinarily, letter-spacing
will destroy ligatures; however, this is <em>wrong</em> if the font is
of a fraktur style, and the package provides a means of protecting the
ligatures in a letter-spaced text.
<dl>
<dt><tt><i>letterspacing.tex</i></tt><dd><a href="http://mirror.ctan.org/macros/generic/misc/letterspacing.tex">macros/generic/misc/letterspacing.tex</a>; <a href="http://mirror.ctan.org//help/Catalogue/entries/letterspacing.html">catalogue entry</a>
<dt><tt><i>microtype.sty</i></tt><dd><a href="http://mirror.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/microtype.zip">macros/latex/contrib/microtype</a> (or <a href="http://mirror.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/microtype/">browse the directory</a>); <a href="http://mirror.ctan.org/help/Catalogue/entries/microtype.html">catalogue entry</a>
<dt><tt><i>soul.sty</i></tt><dd><a href="http://mirror.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/soul.zip">macros/latex/contrib/soul</a> (or <a href="http://mirror.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/soul/">browse the directory</a>); <a href="http://mirror.ctan.org/help/Catalogue/entries/soul.html">catalogue entry</a>

</dl>
<p/><p>This question on the Web: <a href="http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=letterspace">http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=letterspace</a>
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