Other World Mapper Forum

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 :\

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.

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.

"adjust[ing] spacing uniformly over a range of characters" is correct :)

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.

Sounds good :)

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

-Katie