Font Tracking in ppt

Question

I need to set font tracking to 80% in a ppt slide, but it appears you can only set character spacing of pts. How many pts equals 80%?? I am using a purchased font (Whitney Light)

Answer 1

80% is equal to 10pts

hope this helps

Answer 2

No, ignore that other answer. They have no clue; that chart had to do with overall font scaling and nothing to do with tracking.

The effect of the point-based tracking in Microsoft Office is to tighten or loosen text spacing by a set physical distance that does not scale with the size. So tracking 10-pt type by +2 is the same as tracking 20-pt type by +4.

I'm not sure what your 80% refers to. In what app or environment are you used to using an 80% setting? What on earth did it mean there?

I suspect that it actually means to scale the type horizontally by 80%, not adjust tracking at all. That would be a logical meaning of 80% that would affect the horizontal space taken by the text.

If you really think you want “80% tracking”.... I know a fair bit about font metrics and typography, at the technical level in particular. I've done webinars on how a type designer should set up spacing for a font. I have been the liaison between Adobe’s type group and the Adobe InDesign team. Yet I have no idea how one could possibly interpret “80%” because that's not how fonts are spaced. If it literally meant to reduce the space allocated to each glyph by 20% of the glyph width, that would result in bizarre results and horribly uneven spacing (imagine that an n and m start with the same amount of white space on either size of each glyph, as they should. But because the m is almost twice as wide, it gets almost twice as much space taken off each side to reach “80%”—that would be silly.

Which is why no program I know of does tracking by percentage. They all do it in some kind of units, from a baseline of zero being normal spacing. Either the units are fixed absolute amounts so the effect varies by size (e.g. points in Microsoft Office) or they are some unit that varies with type size, such as 1/1000 of the em (Adobe InDesign). I think QuarkXPress uses 1/200 of the em. (Note, in traditional typography, 1 em is equal to the current point size of the type.) But either way, you want the amount of space adjustment to be the same for every letter, and not to vary when the width of the letter varies... unless you are scaling the letter widths. But that wouldn't be tracking.