On 10/12/2016 02:17 AM, Peter Nermander wrote: >> >> >> The tooltip in Scribus says "Word Tracking", but kerning is what it is. >> > > Doesn't this depend on what is selected? > > If the cursor is between two letters, the tool becomes kerning, however if > a word or sentence is selected, the tool becomes tracking. > >From what I can find in various locations, originally kerning applied to the tail or part of a letter that went outside the boundaries of the designated boundary, such as the long swooping tail of a capital Q.
Now it tends to be applied to adjustments in the space between letters. If you do this in a global sort of way, this seems to be referred to a work tracking, though to me I think this is a badly constructed term, since it might theoretically mean you just change the space between words. In Scribus, you can see that there is only one process, changing the space between letters. If your cursor is between two letters, only that space is adjusted. If you highlight a few letters, a word, a sentence or a paragraph, only the spaces between glyphs in the highlighted area are adjusted. If you simply use a selected frame not in Edit Contents mode you adjust the spaces between all the glyphs. Kerning is probably most often done as an aesthetic choice, when the automatic space between glyphs doesn't look quite right. Word tracking is a very common operation in publications like newspapers, where one is trying to fix some ugliness or squeeze more words into a narrow fully justified column of text. Greg
