Tracking

When a designer is arranging letterforms, the shapes and sizes of negative spaces become particularly important to both legibility and readability. Decisions regarding letterspacing, tracking, kerning, word spacing, leading, and paragraph demarcation heavily affect the readability of any design that includes text. A letterspace is the space between two letters in a word. The terms tracking and kerning describe specific ways that letterspaces can be modified. The term letterspacing is often used to generally describe the collective letterspaces within a string or block of text, but can also be used interchangeably with the term tracking. Tracking happens when letterspaces are consistently increased or decreased within a string of text. Typefaces can be tracked to have wide letterspacing or narrow letterspacing. Moderately widening and shortening letterspacing can be useful to adapt typefaces to accommodate very long or short measures of text; however, both can be difficult to read in long passages. Usually an average amount of letterspacing will be most readable and the most legible, but most important is that letterspacing be consistent. Inconsistent letterspacing will confuse readers as to which letters are in which words and will create and inconsistent visual texture. Sometimes it is necessary to track or kern adjacent letters to make the letterspacing appear more even.