Another Capitalization Question

[wwgreaves]

I need to use small caps and all caps in a document I am preparing. Is there any way to add additional space between the characters (such as make the character spacing 125?)?

if so, I can't find it listed in the documentation.

If not, shouldn't there be a way to do this?

Many thanks,

Bill

[phspaelti]

I think you need to use kerning for that: Format > Kern > Loosen / Loosen By…

[wwgreaves]

Thanks, but I want to do it by an exact amount of space by percentage — like line spacing.

Is there a way to do that?

[phspaelti]

I am pretty sure that that kind of thing is against the law, and if you try to do that you get arrested by the Font Police.

[martin]

The font police are pretty strict, haha. But it's true, I don't believe there's any way to specify kerning in terms of the character width. You're best off using character styles to enforce font sizes and kerning that consistently look good together.

[Groucho]

Many years ago, some twenty or so, I remember Aldus FreeHand (I suppose that was the name) allowed you to set the kerning in ens. Now, ens, like ems, are a relative measure unit, so 0.2ens was 20 percent. of the width of a lowercase en letter in that particular font. I think that was some typographic feature of centuries gone. But you couldn’t set the kerning so as to be relative to each letter. Kerning is set by couples of letters. For example, there’s a specific kerning between “l” and “m” and another between “l” and “i”, and so on. That’s why designing a font is such a maddening job. And that’s why I stick to few good fonts instead of a bulk of fanciful and often sloppily made ones.

Henry.