Kerning in microsoft word

Beside Spacing, select Expanded to increase the space between characters or Condensed to decrease the space between characters from the drop-down menu. In the By box to the right of spacing, click the up or down arrows to increase or decrease the amount, in points, by which the text is expanded or condensed.

The Font dialog box appears as follows with options for Normal, Expanded or Condensed spacing: In some other programs, this type of spacing is called tracking. Subscribe to get more articles like this one Did you find this article helpful?

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Toggle navigation. To change kerning automatically, perform the following steps: Select the text whose kerning you want to adjust.

Choose the Tools option from the Font menu. Word displays the Font dialog box. Make sure the Character Spacing tab is selected. See Figure 1. Figure 1. The Character Spacing tab of the Font dialog box.

Click on the Kerning for Fonts check box. Adjust the character point size to indicate when Word should start adjusting kerning. Click on OK. In these cases, you can manually adjust kerning by following these steps: Select the text whose kerning you want to adjust. Display the Character Spacing tab. Clear the Kerning for Fonts check box. In the Spacing pull-down list, select Expanded or Condensed, depending on whether you want to move the characters further apart or closer together.

If a line contains several very long words, the space between them becomes large and it results in an ugly, ragged-looking text. The Corel WordPerfect program that I used in the past has several nice features that I miss in Words, among them the adjustable kerning.

The maximum and minimum amount of compression and expansion that is applied is user settable. Very long words are thereby compressed or expanded to fit in or fill up available space on the line. In most cases, it eliminates large gaps between words. It produces smoother looking text. Word should incorporate this feature.

Technically, kerning is not simply condensing the spaces between letters. It reduces the spacing between particular pairs of letters where the overlap doesn't cause collisions, such as between the T and the A and between the L and the Y in the second line of the following picture:. The spaces between the A and the L or between the two Ls are not affected.

This rarely makes any perceptible difference except in large font sizes. Word does have the ability to condense any selected text. In the picture of the Font dialog in my previous post, you can set the Spacing dropdown to Condensed and enter an amount in tenths of a point in the corresponding By box.

If a series of long words in your document causes large inter-word gaps, you can select those words and condense them by 0. However, Word won't do this automatically.

Word does have the ability to "expand" or "condense" text by settable amounts in increments of 0. Under "Font - Advanced - Spacing" menu. Where text looks bad due to large spaces between words, judicious selection of text and manually expanding or condensing those selections can yield a much smooter-appearing text.

This is a very labor intensive undertaking when one is dealing with several hundred pages of text, but is highly desirable for literary works, especially for 6 by 9 inch books containg many long words. Expansion up to 0. Hyphenation is often but not always a helpful feature. Automatic expansion and condensing of text as well as word spacing within settable limits would be a very valuable addition to Word.