[Scribus] OT kerning (or tracking) specs.

Tornóci László torlasz
Sat Jan 20 11:07:39 CET 2007


John R. Culleton wrote:
> I have a customer who has a designer who has specified the setting of certain 
> text headings etc. with the terminology:
> "kerning 250"
> or
>  "kerning 40"
> 
> I am not familiar with this particular terminology. Neither is my InDesign 
> consultant.  It looks like 100 may be normal letter spacing but I am not 
> sure. In any case I would call this tracking rather than kerning.  Since it 
> isn't TeX and isn't InDesign teminology I assume it is Quark-speak. 
A lot of people use the term 'kerning' when they really mean 'tracking'. 
Kerning is usually expressed in thousands of an em. Funny thing is, for 
text headings you usually need to have tighter tracking (negative 
numbers), not a looser one (positive numbers). So I guess you had better 
clarify the situation with the designer.

I got all this information from James Felici's book 'The Complete Manual 
of Typography'. I have found this book very useful for a newcomer to 
typography like me.

				Yours: Laszlo
> 
> Any Quark folk on list who have seen this kind of specification before?   If 
> so can you explain what is desired in the two instances shown above? Are 
> these 100th parts of an em or an en?  I hate to look ignorant to my customer 
> but my experience is primarily in TeX where fiddling with letter spacing is 
> more or less anathema. 
> 




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