52 Typography: Tight and Loose Tracking
Sometimes in your PDF output you will find word spacing that is too loose for your liking. Or, sometimes you might want to tighten or loosen your word spacing (tracking) in order to avoid a widow or orphan. Or you might want to use this to make “thin spaces” in certain kinds of words.
You can tighten or loosen tracking in the following ways:
To tighten a paragraph, go to the TEXT editor, and wrap the paragraph in the following code:
<p class="tight">text text whole para should get tightened</p>
To tighten just a few words in a para, use a <span>
, so:
Text text <span class="tight">text needing tightening</span> text text.
You can apply these styles using:
<span class="tight">
<span class="very-tight">
<span class="loose">
<span class="very-loose">
And you can find all this in the STYLES menu in the VISUAL EDITOR.
For the techies, the CSS applied by these various styles is:
.tight,
p.tight {
letter-spacing: -0.25px;
word-spacing: -0.075em;
}
.very-tight,
p.very-tight {
letter-spacing: -0.5px;
word-spacing: -0.09em;
}
.loose,
p.loose {
letter-spacing: 0.25px;
word-spacing: 0.075em;
}
.very-loose,
p.very-loose {
letter-spacing: 0.5px;
word-spacing: 0.09em;
}