How to Adjust Character Spacing and Kerning in Microsoft Word

While choosing an attractive font and setting line height are standard steps in document design, professional typography often hinges on fine-tuning the space between individual letters. In Microsoft Word, headings can appear disjointed if characters are spaced too loosely, while dense body paragraphs or sidebars may require subtle expansion or condensation to fit perfectly on a printed page. Moreover, proportional letter combinations—such as “AV”, “To”, or “WA”—can produce unsightly gaps unless typographic kerning is enabled.

In this guide, you will learn how to adjust character spacing and enable automatic kerning in Microsoft Word, customize text scaling and baseline elevation, and establish typographic defaults across your document templates.

---

Tracking vs Kerning: What is the Difference?

Before adjusting typographic parameters, understanding these two typesetting terms ensures you achieve the desired visual balance:

• Character Spacing (Tracking): Uniformly increases or decreases the space between every character in a selected block of text. It is commonly used on uppercase headings to create an airy, modern aesthetic or in tables to prevent awkward line breaks.
• Kerning: The contextual adjustment of space between specific pairs of letters (such as “AV”, “Ta”, or “Yo”) based on their overlapping geometric shapes, ensuring consistent optical visual rhythm.
• Position (Baseline Shift): Elevates or depresses characters relative to the baseline without altering font size, providing more control than standard superscript or subscript toggles.

---

How to Access the Advanced Font Settings in Word

Character spacing controls reside inside the dedicated Font dialogue box:

1. Highlight the text you want to format in your Microsoft Word document.
2. In the Home tab on the ribbon, click the small Dialogue Box Launcher icon in the lower-right corner of the Font group.
3. Alternatively, press the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + D (or Cmd + D on macOS).
4. Click the Advanced tab at the top of the dialogue box.

---

Adjusting Character Spacing (Expanded or Condensed)

To spread letters further apart or squeeze them closer together:

1. Inside the Advanced tab, locate the Spacing dropdown menu.
2. Choose your spacing style:
   • Expanded: Pushes letters apart.
   • Condensed: Pulls letters closer together.
3. In the adjacent By box, specify the distance in points (pt). You can enter increments as small as 0.1 pt (for instance, 1.5 pt for elegant chapter headings, or 0.3 pt for tighter subheadings).
4. Review the real-time preview in the Preview pane at the bottom of the window, then click OK.

---

How to Enable Automatic Kerning in Microsoft Word

By default, Microsoft Word disables automatic kerning to preserve rendering speed on legacy documents. Enabling it instantly eliminates awkward gaps in display headlines:

1. Highlight your headline or press Ctrl + A to select the entire document.
2. Open the Font dialogue box (Ctrl + D) and switch to the Advanced tab.
3. Check the box labelled Kerning for fonts.
4. In the Points and above field, enter your preferred size threshold. Entering 12 pt or 14 pt ensures all primary body copy and larger headings benefit from proportional pair fitting, while leaving tiny footnote fonts untouched.
5. Click OK to apply.

---

Customising Scale and Vertical Position

The Advanced Font tab includes additional typographic tools to finesse layouts:

1. Horizontal Character Scaling

Use the Scale dropdown to stretch or compress the glyphs themselves (from 33% up to 200%) without altering their vertical font size, which is useful when creating logos or custom mastheads.

2. Raised and Lowered Baseline Positions

To shift characters vertically without converting them into superscripts:

1. Click the Position dropdown and choose Raised or Lowered.
2. In the By field, enter the exact point offset (e.g. 3 pt).
3. Click OK.

---

Setting Custom Typography as the Default Template

If you want all future documents based on the Normal template to incorporate custom kerning and letter spacing:

1. Open the Font dialogue box (Ctrl + D) > Advanced.
2. Enable your desired kerning and character spacing parameters.
3. Click the Set As Default button in the bottom-left corner.
4. Select All documents based on the Normal.dotm template and click OK.

For additional text styling controls, discover how to clear all formatting from text in Microsoft Word to reset corrupted styles, or learn how to use the Reveal Formatting pane in Microsoft Word to inspect and compare styles across complex documents.

---

Frequently Asked Questions

Why does condensing text cause letters to overlap?

Entering too high a value in the Condensed field (such as 2 pt or higher on a small font) pulls glyph bounding boxes over one another. Always use subtle values between 0.2 pt and 0.8 pt for body text.

Do kerning settings carry over when exporting to PDF?

Yes. When you save or export your document as a PDF from Microsoft Word, all character positions, tracking offsets, and kerning pairs are embedded into the PDF stream and display identically across all devices and printers.

Can I adjust kerning in Word for the Web?

No. Advanced character spacing and kerning are features exclusive to the desktop editions of Microsoft Word (Windows and macOS). The web browser edition displays existing spacing but does not offer controls to alter point metrics.