The amount of letter-spacing can affect how text is perceived.

The addition of minimal letter-spacing can often increase the legibility and readability.

Tight letter-spacing, particularly in small text sizes, can diminish legibility.

Letter-spacing can be confused with kerning.

Letter-spacing is increased or decreased by modest (usually unnoticeable) amounts to fix these unattractive situations.

Letter-spacing is not supposed to be affected by it, although some buggy computer fonts may add an unneeded space before the next letter.

Kerning and letter-spacing can be adjusted on a per-glyph basis using keyboard shortcuts.

Conversely, the increase of letter-spacing in text (to an extent) increases legibility, and the cultural association is of a more objective typographic voice.

Readability can also be compromised by letter-spacing, word spacing, or leading that is too tight or too loose.

For example, letter-spacing affects оу as if they were two individual letters, and never affects components of ы .

Kerning adjusts the space between individual letter forms, while tracking (letter-spacing) adjusts spacing uniformly over a range of characters.

Letter-spacing may also refer to the insertion of fixed spaces, as was commonly done in hand-set metal type to achieve letter-spacing.

The lack of serifs, large x-height, wide proportions, loose letter-spacing, large counters, and emphasized distinctions between similarly-shaped characters are chosen to increase legibility.

What is common to most systems is that the default setting of letter-spacing or tracking is zero, using the widths (and kerning information) built into the font itself.

As reading with phonetic writing systems is based in part on context, and with unfamiliar words, on phonetic pronunciation, recognition of individual characters can be aided by slightly increased letter-spacing.

The font was first used as the text face for Scientific American magazine, and its letter-spacing was tightened to give it a slightly closer fit for use in two and three column formats.

In typography, letter-spacing, usually called tracking by typographers, refers to a consistent degree of increase (or sometimes decrease) of space between letters to affect density in a line or block of text.

This letter-spacing is referred to as sperren in German which could be translated as "spacing out": in typesetting with letters of lead, the spacing would be achieved by inserting additional non-printing slices of metal between the types, usually about an eighth of an em wide.

Characteristics include inconsistent letterspacing, varying typeweights within single words and type set at unusual angles.

Tahoma is similar to Verdana but with tighter letterspacing.

At the time the documents were purportedly created, the matching letterspacing could only have been produced using phototypesetting or hot-metal printing.

In contrast, the variability of character widths available on early 1970s typewriters using proportional letterspacing was more limited, due to the mechanical technology employed.

When using that method, black-letter ligatures like ch, ck, tz or ſt remain together without additional letterspacing (ſt is dissolved, though).

Until the advent of phototypesetting, the term "letterspacing" referred strictly to the adding of space between the individual letters of words set in metal type, in increments of a minimum of point.

As Phinney explained, the letterspacing of the Times New Roman font used by Microsoft Word with a modern personal computer and printer employs a system of 18 units relative to the letter height (em), with common characters being 5 to 17 units wide.

Because of the differing character widths employed, the letterspacing exhibited by the Killian documents (matching that produced by a modern computer and printer) could not have been produced with a mechanical typewriter using proportional letterspacing in the early 1970s.