Tracking (typography)

Positive, Normal, and Negative Tracking

Tracking (from the English tracking ) - a uniform change in the distance between letters (inter-letter spaces).

Unlike kerning , which regulates the distance between characters in certain pairs (“AV”, “TA”, etc.), tracking is applied to a group of characters (word, line, paragraph, etc.).

Increased tracking ( discharge ) makes the set more sparse, bright; decrease is more dense and darker.

Tracking is an effective means of string fitting and forcing . Measured in thousandths of round spations (em / 1000).

In Russian and foreign typographic traditions, too wide a discharge of lowercase letters is considered undesirable, but an increased discharge of capital letters is encouraged. This tradition is connected with the fact that before the appearance of computer typesetting, wider font styles were used for headings, which already had enough free space between the strokes. Since the size of most computer fonts is controlled by simply scaling one style, the distance separating the capital letter from the subsequent text seems insufficient to separate all the capital letters ^[1] .