[texhax] units for tracking (was Re: Book Antiqua)
William Adams
will.adams at frycomm.com
Tue May 23 18:52:58 CEST 2006
On May 23, 2006, at 12:26 PM, pierre.mackay wrote:
> Your mention of the Monotype unit leads me to ask you as someone
> who is likely to know. I have a macro for letterspacing in titles
> that I wrote when that was still expressed in Monotype units. Then
> I had to translate it into Quark units, and now it is expressed as
> Track 10, which I guess is the same as a Monotype unit, because the
> designer hasn't complained. Can you give me a reference to
> something that would translate back and forth from Monotype units
> to Quark units to Track numbers? I should be very grateful.
``Monotype Units'' were more likely 1/18em. Metal type was designed
to a unit system, originally dividing an em into 18ths. Later the
granularity was tripled to 1/54em, which was carried forward to the
various phototype systems for compatibility's sake.
Quark tracking values are done in 1/200 of an em, so 10 inserts
1/20th of an em between each character so formatted, which isn't too
far from 1/18th of an em.
For the record, InDesign tracks in 1/1000 of an em units, so you need
to multiple Quark values by 5 to get an equivalent (which may vary
somewhat depending on whether or no optical kerning &c. are turned on).
William
--
William Adams
senior graphic designer
Fry Communications
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