Letter spacing

[John Josey]

Does anyone have a formula they use when hand-kerning between letters to tighten up the gaps? InDesign's optical setting helps, but some typefaces (Myriad Pro Bold Condensed and Times New Roman to be specific since those are our display types) still have large and distinct gaps between some letters and not enough gap between others.

Thanks.

[Santosh]

In quark you can edit H&J. Within H&J Method dialog box you can define spacing between charecters and words which can be applied to the text stylesheets. Hope InDesign will also have a similar feature to edit H&J. Instead of manually kerning text everytime it's better to crate H&J style sheets for text, display header etc seperately

[Dave Dombrowski]

Many generic fonts like Myriad and Times New Roman that are meant for a wide variety of uses don't have many kerning pairs built in, which InDesign needs for accurate kerning at different sizes. You'll have much better luck using custom faces meant for headlines. If that's not an option, you'll need to set up a bunch of stylesheets for commonly used headline sizes and set the tracking in the style for each size. There's no formula I know for manual kerning - it's just trial and error until it looks right. What works for one font in one size won't work for another font or size.

[John Josey]

Yeah, that's exactly what we're running into. We're not budgeted for custom hed faces, so we're kind of sticking with what came in the box. Thanks for the help, folks.

[Fred Matamoros]

I would also recommend studying the relationships between letterforms and practice your "color spacing." A lot of it has to do with personal taste, but this is a craft you can spend years perfecting. I may sound a bit "old school" here...but there is a lot of value in taking a bit more time with display text. Dave D. is correct; formulas won't bring the same results as approaching it like a graphic designer. Here's a good book:

http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Typographic-Style-Robert-Bringhurst/...