Adjusting Text Spacing Without Tracking

When you need to make more text fit in a given area, do you automatically adjust the tracking? An alternative to tracking text is to adjust the Letterspacing setting in the Justification dialog box.

To do this, insert your cursor into a paragraph, press Cmd-Opt-Shift-J (Ctrl-Alt-Shift-J), then reduce both the minimum and desired letterspacing values.

Before:



After:

The key difference between this process and tracking the paragraph is that (assuming you have the Adobe Paragraph Composer chosen) the spacing will not be exactly the same between each character or word, but rather will be optimized according to the available space and potential line and hyphenation breaks within the paragraph.

While not as convenient and fast as tracking, adjusting the letterspacing yields a better type color. A potential downside is that paragraphs adjusted in this way cannot be easily identified by a color highlight, the way those that have been tracked can.