Improve your typography and design skills with this InDesign tutorial, detailing the ins and outs of optical and metric kerning, tracking, and manual kerning, along with step-by-step exercises for practical learning.
This exercise is excerpted from Noble Desktop’s past Adobe InDesign training materials and is compatible with InDesign updates through 2020. To learn current skills in InDesign, check out our InDesign Bootcamp and graphic design classes in NYC and live online.
Topics covered in this InDesign tutorial:
Optical vs. metric kerning, Kerning vs. tracking, Manual kerning
Exercise Preview
Exercise Overview
Proper kerning and tracking are some of the finer elements of a well-typeset design. Here you will track and kern the headlines to give the title a finished look.
Open the file yourname-uninspirational poster.indd. If you didn’t get a chance to complete this poster in an earlier exercise, open uninspirational poster - done.indd.
Zoom in a lot on the text so you can see it well.
Look at the space between the letters. Look for letters that have gaps between them or are too close together, possibly touching. For instance, the O and the R in Exploration are quite far apart; in the 2-line subtitle, the word Way appears two times. There is too much space between the W and a.
Optical vs. Metric Kerning
Every font has built-in kerning called metrics. But not all fonts do a good job of kerning, and what if you have one letter of one font, and another letter of another font? InDesign can do kerning for you based on the shape of the characters. InDesign calls this Optical kerning.
Use the Selection tool
to select the Exploration text frame.Switch to the Type tool
so the Control panel displays the text options.Near the middle of the Control panel’s Character options
, find the Kerning option 
. From the Kerning menu, choose Optical. (While it’s not quite perfect, it’s definitely better.)Use the Selection tool
to select the 2-line subtitle below.Switch to the Type tool
and again choose Optical kerning.In this case, the kerning is worse! The gap next to each of the W’s is now too big. Optical is not always better. It all depends on the font and the particular letters used. Switch back to Metrics for this 2-line subtitle.
Manual Kerning
Regardless of whether you’re using Optical or Metric kerning, you might not be satisfied with the result, so you can manually kern what you don’t like. You’ll mostly use keystrokes to adjust the amount of kerning, but InDesign’s default amount for these shortcuts is a bit big. In the InDesign menu (Mac) or Edit menu (Windows), choose Preferences and then Units & Increments.
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Under Keyboard Increments, set Kerning/Tracking to 5 and click OK.
Note for former Quark users: 5 in InDesign equals 1 in Quark. So a kerning of 1, 2, 3 in Quark is 5, 10, 15 in InDesign.
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Look through both the 2-line subtitle and the Exploration title for bad kerning. Put the cursor between any two letters and use the following keystrokes to decrease or increase any undesirable spacing. Don’t bother with the disclaimer text at the bottom. It’s too small for people to really notice.
To kern in small increments:
Mac: Opt–Left Arrow (decreases space) or Opt–Right Arrow (increases space) Windows: Alt–Left Arrow (decreases space) or Alt–Right Arrow (increases space) To kern in larger increments:
Mac: Cmd–Opt–Left Arrow (decreases space) or Cmd–Opt–Right Arrow (increases space) Windows: Ctrl–Alt–Left Arrow (decreases space) or Ctrl–Alt–Right Arrow (increases space) TIP: Remember that kerning is meant only to fix bad pairs of letters. If it’s an overall, more equal correction you want, then select all the text and track it. The same keystrokes work, but tracking removes/adds an even amount of space across all the selected letters, whereas kerning adjusts only the space between two letters.
When done, you’ll probably need to use the Selection tool
to adjust the width of the rule under Exploration.Save the document as yourname-uninspirational poster.indd.
