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Pierce403

: How to find out fonts' native word space? I need to set up average word space of M/4 in InDesign where M = 10pt. That is equal to 2.5pt. InDesign lets me adjust word spacing in terms of

@Pierce403

Posted in: #AdobeIndesign #Typography

I need to set up average word space of M/4 in InDesign where M = 10pt. That is equal to 2.5pt. InDesign lets me adjust word spacing in terms of percentage of fonts' native word spacing.

However, I have no idea how to get fonts' native word spacing figure, therefore I can't figure out what % of that I need to get 2.5 points. How/where can I read fonts' default word spacing from?

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@Ann6370331

For an exact figure: Open the font in a font editor (there are free ones and free trial versions) and check the width of the space character (U+0020). It is measured in units per em and em is equal to the point size.

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@Lengel450

Word spacing is a proportional measure. You may have to approximate it by experiment. Proportionality may have a benefit working with percentages.

If you set MMM (three solid glyphs) and M M (three glyphs enclosing two letter spaces and a word space), the difference of the distance between them is a word space.

Measuring carefully will/may give you the current (native?) word space.

You can reduce your measurement error by either:1.) increasing the font point size and/or by2.) increasing the number of characters in the experiment to ten, or twenty, say.

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