Typography

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Kerning, tracking, leading

Lesson 10 of 34 in Typography.

Typography: What is Kerning, Tracking and Leading? · Envato Tuts+
Lesson

Three different controls that all look like spacing. Kerning en.wikipedia.org is per pair. Letter spacing en.wikipedia.org, called tracking, is applied to everything at once. Leading en.wikipedia.org is vertical, between lines.

AVas drawn · a gapAVkerned · one pair movedkerning is one pair · tracking is the whole run
The same letter pair unkerned and kerned.
A two-page spread from Bodoni's specimen book. The left page is the title page, MANUALE TIPOGRAFICO set in widely spaced capitals inside a double rule. The right page, numbered 244, shows the capitals A to L at enormous size in a serif with hairline-thin horizontals and heavy vertical stems.
A spread from Bodoni's 1818 type specimen book, with giant capitals whose thin strokes are almost hairlines. That extreme thick and thin became a style of its own.Manuale Tipografico, specimen page. Giambattista Bodoni, published posthumously by Margherita Dall'Aglio, Parma, 1818.Wikimedia Commons/Public domain

Try it

Switch the kerning off and look at AV. Then move tracking and leading on the paragraph until it reads easily.

Kerning

The space between ONE specific pair of letters. An A next to a V leaves a hole, because the two diagonals lean away from each other; the fix is a rule stored in the font for that pair and about a thousand others. It is not a setting you apply to a paragraph, that is tracking, below, and using one for the other is the most common typographic mistake there is.

AVATAR Wo. To,

font-kerning: normal, look at AV, Wo and the comma after To

Tracking

0/1000 em

Leading

1.50×

Tracking is space added to EVERY pair at once. It is right for a line of capitals, which were designed for inscriptions and are too tight together at small sizes, and it is wrong for body text, where the font's own spacing is already the answer.

Leading is the distance between baselines, and it is the one setting most people get wrong in the same direction: too tight. The longer the line, the more you need, because the eye has to find the start of the next one. The word is from the strips of lead a compositor slid between lines of metal type, which is also why it rhymes with sledding.

Nobody set the Preamble of the Indian Constitution. It was written out by hand, letter by letter, and its hierarchy is made entirely of case and weight rather than of font choices, the four big nouns in capitals, the grammar hurrying between them in a cursive hand. Set the same words in a typeface with the same instructions and you get something correct and dead. What hand-lettering buys is unevenness with intent, and things a font cannot do: a line that tightens as it runs out of room, a break no art director would approve that nobody has ever complained about.

letter-spacing: 0.000em · line-height: 1.50

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  1. Question 1, locked

    What is the difference between kerning and tracking?

    • Kerning adjusts one specific pair of letters, tracking adjusts a whole run
    • Kerning is for headlines, tracking is for body text
    • Kerning is automatic, tracking is manual
  2. Question 2, locked

    Which of these words means this? “Adjusting the space between one specific pair of letters, because that pair fits badly.”

    • Instance
    • Axis
    • Kerning
    • Ratio
  3. Question 3, locked

    Which of these words means this? “Adding or removing space evenly across a run of letters.”

    • Readability
    • cpl
    • River
    • Tracking

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