When you compare text outside a circle with the exact same text set on the inside of that exact same circle, the former is set looser than the latter. Typeface: Sabre by Gareth HagueĪs we have seen in our mid-series intermezzo Adventures in Space: Special Cases, setting type on a curve or circle can affect the spacing and kerning quite dramatically. This effect is exaggerated when the baseline is shifted. Type set inside a circle tends to crowd, while the letters will fan out if set outside the circle. Subtle positive tracking of small text adds space between the characters, increasing the legibility thoughtful negative tracking of headlines and titles moves the glyphs closer together which improves the letter fit.
While users have no control over the actual design of the glyphs, they can correct the spacing by tracking the typeface. Because spacing is an integral part of the type design process, these versions for new technologies often seemed too tight when used in small body sizes, or too loose in large display sizes. Usually this was an intermediary size that still would work reasonably well when scaled up or down. These differences were quite spectacular in the types cut by Bodoni and his contemporaries.įor economical reasons one single optical size was used as the basis for new versions when metal typefaces first transitioned to photo composition and later to digital.
Type cut for smaller sizes typically had more generous proportions and sturdier features, while the same typeface cut for display sizes often was narrower, with longer ascenders and descenders, and a higher contrast. Originally in metal type, size-specific variations were cut for each point size to optimize the legibility of a typeface. However it can also be used to correct the general spacing of a typeface. Tracking is often applied as an aesthetic device, for example to lend extra gravitas to a book title in capitals on the title page, or to give a headline a little room to breathe (or on the contrary to make it look more solid). Besides the differences in design, the type also runs wider as it is drawn for increasingly smaller sizes. When set at the same point size, you can clearly see how Akira Kobayashi optimised FF Clifford™’s design for sizes (from top to bottm) 18 pt, 9 pt, and 6 pt. Tracking For SizeĪlthough they are still quite rare in digital type, some families offer optical sizes. This will cause the space after the word to be wider than the space before the word. If however the last character is the final character in the selection, extra space is added between the last character and the space character, thus increasing the amount of space after the word. If the next-to-last character is the final character included in the selection, extra space is added after that character, so de facto in between the two last characters. It may sound counter-intuitive, but if for example you want to track a single word in a sentence, your selection cannot include the last letter of that word. Positive tracking adds an identical amount of space, expressed in the same units as kerning, after every character in a selection of text (negative tracking removes space after every character). So, what does tracking exactly do? We often describe it as adding space or subtracting between glyphs in a sequence of characters, but that is not entirely accurate.
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