Reducing Letter Spacing

[AaronRobinson]

I have a quick question about Affinity Designer and using the Justification section for Text. I am not a graphic designer but instead am mainly looking to use Affinity Designer to do textures for games. I found a font that's interesting (Ultra Font) but the spacing for the font is actual terrible. I was trying to fix this in Affinity Designer but the letter spacing can only be set to -100%. Is there some other way to solve this letter spacing issue and is there some specific reason for the hardcap here?

[Fixx]

You probably need to adjust kerning to fix spacing between characters. The first field in Positioning and Transform area in the Character palette. Direct apply is ALT-left/right arrow.

[Guest]

Hello Aaron Robinson,

In addition to what @Fixx has said, you can also change the spacing between only two characters: place the cursor between these two characters, hold down the "Alt" key and use the left or right arrows to change their spacing. The other characters will not be modified.

[R C-R]

2 hours ago, Fixx said:

You probably need to adjust kerning to fix spacing between characters.

Note that kerning changes the spacing between pairs of characters. Compare that to tracking, which adjusts the spacing uniformly of a range of characters.

In Affinity's Character panel, kerning can only be applied one at a time to individual character pairs, when the insertion cursor is between that pair of characters. If one or more characters is selected (highlighted) the only available options are Auto & 0‰. So adjusting kerning is most useful when you only want to adjust the spacing of a few character pairs, while tracking is a better choice for character runs.

This kerning vs tracking.afdesign file shows two ways of adjusting the character spacing of a text sample using the monospaced Roboto Mono Medium typeface.

[jmwellborn]

That is a very nice explanation of both tracking and kerning.  For people who learn most quickly by sight it should be a screenshot keeper!! 

3 hours ago, R C-R said:

Note that kerning changes the spacing between pairs of characters. Compare that to tracking, which adjusts the spacing uniformly of a range of characters.

In Affinity's Character panel, kerning can only be applied one at a time to individual character pairs, when the insertion cursor is between that pair of characters. If one or more characters is selected (highlighted) the only available options are Auto & 0‰. So adjusting kerning is most useful when you only want to adjust the spacing of a few character pairs, while tracking is a better choice for character runs.

This kerning vs tracking.afdesign file shows two ways of adjusting the character spacing of a text sample using the monospaced Roboto Mono Medium typeface.

 

[AaronRobinson]

Thanks everyone. This explanation of kerning versus tracking was very helpful in working with this font as both are needed. Therefore my issue is resolved. 

However, I still don't know if I understand the different between the Character options that change letter spacing (kerning and tracking) versus the Paragraph options. The main difference seems to be that the Paragraph options are somehow trying to determine optimal spacing (and the -100% limit which was causing difficulties with my font)? Is there a good explanation of when I would use one or the other method for working with some typeset section?