Monday, June 2, 2008

Tracking in Adobe and Quark


Tracking is the process of changing the space between a selection of letters. In QuarkXPress people are used to tightening up the space by changing the amount to -1, -2, or -3 and most people are comfortable with these amounts. If you have been using Quark for awhile and then jump into InDesign, Illustrator or Photoshop and try to use tracking, you may run into some issues. Quark and Adobe measure tracking differently.

In QuarkXPress tracking is measured in units 1/200th of an em. In Adobe applications this is measured in units 1/000th of an em. This means that you are using to measuring -1, -2, or -3, you will need to multiply that number by 3 to get the same results in any Adobe application. Therefore you new numbers to type in for tracking are -5, -10, and -15.

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