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Professional layout tools also allow the letter-spacing to grow and shrink and you can tell them to stretch or squeeze letters. Doing this is obviously very co
by ugh 16y ago
Professional layout tools also allow the letter-spacing to grow and shrink and you can tell them to stretch or squeeze letters.
Doing this is obviously very controversial but I think that allowing InDesign to stretch and squeeze letters by a percent or half a percent is visually not noticeable (at least with body text) and can noticeably reduce the number of large holes in your text, especially if the columns of your text are relatively narrow.
Other word processors don’t give you that option at all.
- colanderman 16y agoThere's also a TeX package, microtype, which does this same thing (among other optimizations, such as punctuation overhang). I've found that text with variable font widths looks "off" to my eyes, but because the effect is so subtle I'm not sure that this isn't just psychological.