How to Track Values in InDesign

Digital typography is much easier to adjust than hot-metal type.

Adobe InDesign's typographic controls offer broad control over text formatting, including typeface, style, size, color and leading. Beyond these basic adjustments, InDesign enables you to kern and track your type to fine-tune letter spacing. Whereas kerning adjusts how pairs of letters sit relative to one another, tracking loosens or tightens selected ranges of text -- from a pair of letters to a line of type or an entire page of copy. Tracking can help you pull all or part of a word up to the end of a paragraph or page, avoiding the dreaded widows and orphans that strand words or syllables by themselves.

Instructions

1. Activate the Adobe InDesign Type tool or one of the program's Frame tools. Click and drag on your document page to draw a text frame.

2. Open the "Window" menu, choose its "Type & Tables" sub-menu and select "Character" to bring up the Character panel. Select your desired typeface, size, style and leading.

3. Type your text, paste it in from the clipboard or use InDesign's "Place" command to insert the contents of a text or word-processing file into your text frame. Double-, triple- or quadruple-click to select a word, line or the full contents of the text frame, depending on the extent to which you want to track your type.

4. Select a tracking value from the Character panel's "Tracking" drop-down menu or type in the positive or negative number of your choice. Change the tracking value to tighten or loosen your text.

5. Adjust individual words to finesse the copy-fit of single lines of text. If you set part of your text at a large size to form a headline on your copy, you can adjust letter pairs to balance the space between round and square letters.

Tips & Warnings

• The tracking values you enter in Adobe InDesign represent thousandths of an em, a relative measure defined by the width of a lower-case "m" in the size, typeface and style currently in use.

• To see all the text in an InDesign document to which you've applied manual tracking, open your "Preferences" dialog box, select the "Composition" settings and choose "Select Custom Tracking/Kerning." InDesign highlights all applicable text in orange.

• To remove manual tracking, select your text with the Type tool and enter a zero in the "Tracking" field of the "Character" panel.

• Over-tracking your text makes it unattractive and hard to read.

References

• Adobe Systems: Using Adobe InDesign CS5 & CS5.5
• University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire: Adobe InDesign CS3 Advanced Character Formatting

Resources

• "Real World Adobe InDesign CS5"; Olav Martin Kvern, et al.
• "InDesign CS5 Bible"; Galen Gruman