The horizontal space between characters is called the kerning. This has two aspects – the overall spacing between characters and the spacing of particular sets of letters.
Character-spacing is often used by designers to give a font a slightly different feel. It might be used, for example, when updating a client’s house font without impacting the existing corporate material too much. Here is an example. The top version is with the default font spacing whilst the bottom text has had the spacing reduced by 10%
Unlike most other programs which offer control of kerning you can set character spacing to different settings for any word or piece of text within a text object.
The use of specific spacing between different pairs of letters is even more important as it avoids unsightly gaps between letters in words. When text is placed on a page it is usually done so in a gap which is the width of the character plus a small border to separate it from the next and preceding characters.
However, some characters, such as the uppercase W and T, are wider at the top than at the bottom and therefore lowercase characters before and after them appear to be a little distant. Kerning pairs allow these gaps to be reduced by setting a variation of the standard character spacing for the specific character pairings. Consider the example below. The first version has no kerning pairs whilst the one below has the Opus default kerning pairs enabled.
For most circumstances you need make no changes to these settings but if you wish to then the process is described in the topics listed below.
Related Topics