Spacing between letters

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Balmung
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Spacing between letters

Post by Balmung » Mon Apr 05, 2021 10:01 am

Yesterday I named the states of my worldmap. Like in an atlas map I have a specific format, but since some states are really large I would like to expand the label by increasing the space between the letters. I tried just adding a blank space after each letter, but sometimes it was too much and sometimes too less, but two blank spaces were again too much :\
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SilverSurfer1221
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Re: Spacing between letters

Post by SilverSurfer1221 » Mon Apr 05, 2021 1:05 pm

I think what you are asking for here is kerning. It is a means of adjusting the spacing between letters and a lot of graphics software, like Photoshop and Affinity Photo, have this. It would definitely be great to have the ability to adjust kerning in OWM.

nDervish
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Re: Spacing between letters

Post by nDervish » Tue Apr 06, 2021 3:27 am

SilverSurfer1221 wrote:
Mon Apr 05, 2021 1:05 pm
I think what you are asking for here is kerning. It is a means of adjusting the spacing between letters and a lot of graphics software, like Photoshop and Affinity Photo, have this. It would definitely be great to have the ability to adjust kerning in OWM.
Technically, according to wikipedia, he's talking about tracking or letter spacing ("adjust[ing] spacing uniformly over a range of characters") rather than kerning ("adjust[ing] the space between individual letterforms"). I haven't noticed any kerning issues with proportional fonts in OWM, but, yes, options to expand or compress letter spacing overall would be nice.

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Balmung
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Re: Spacing between letters

Post by Balmung » Tue Apr 06, 2021 6:17 am

"adjust[ing] spacing uniformly over a range of characters" is correct :)
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SilverSurfer1221
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Re: Spacing between letters

Post by SilverSurfer1221 » Tue Apr 06, 2021 11:17 am

However, you don't always want to uniformly track spacing between all letters. You don't want to end up with the same spacing between an "I" and another letter and a "T" and another letter and an "A" and a "W". Thus, kerning. Letter spacing (normally called Tracking) adjusts uniformly (as you pointed out). The end result of tracking is an "i" can look too far away from some letters while a "T" or "W" can end up looking too crowded. Technically, OWM should support both tracking and kerning. For those that work in type setting, tracking is often way over-used while kerning is not used enough. Kerning can get you better results as you don't have to restrict it to just pairs of letters. It can be applied to an entire word or even a sentence or paragraph, if needed.

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Balmung
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Re: Spacing between letters

Post by Balmung » Tue Apr 06, 2021 12:37 pm

Sounds good :)
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Kyete
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Re: Spacing between letters

Post by Kyete » Fri Jun 25, 2021 3:54 pm

That's a good point. I'll add this as something to investigate. Thank you all for the feedback!

-Katie

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