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Some typographers say it's a good habit to increase the letterspace when writing words in caps or small caps. So my question is, how to do it with pdflatex and/or xelatex? And while we're at it, which words would you alter this way? Acronyms like USA, NATO, IBM, GNU, etc.? How about words like PCs, UdSSR, FreeBSD or TV-Station?

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5 Answers 5

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Use the microtype package, loading it with [tracking=smallcaps] should take care of small caps

For all-uppercase words you can use microtype's \textls, e.g.

\newcommand{\versal}[1]{\textscale{0.9}{\textls*[80]{#1}}}

(I came across this here, check the provided “Präambel”, the spacing/scaling might be font specific, so use with care and check your output, maybe someone else could comment on this one)

hope this helps

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In XeLaTeX with the fontspec package you can select a font with the LetterSpace feature:

\newcommand\tracked[1]{%
  {\addfontfeature{LetterSpace=2}#1}}

LetterSpace=s is an additional s/F space between letters where F is the font size.

(I swear I once saw an example of letterspacing involving additional glue rather than just fixed space, but I can't see anything around that this could be. Any idea?)

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Another example, this is what's used in the TUGboat journal:

\usepackage{relsize}
\def\acro#1{\textsmaller{#1}\@}

They also have a list of abbreviations/acronyms you can use to get some ideas how/what to letterspace, see tugboat.dtx

For example,

\def\MacOSX{Mac\,\acro{OS\,X}}

or

\def\MathML{Math\acro{ML}}

You can use the microtype package and AssBurger's \versal command if you want additional microtypgraphic features like increased letterspace.

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Something I found on a UK mailing list while searching for a solution to increase the letterspace that I think is important to know:

Possibly the ‘ultimate’ in this field is the microtype, which uses the micro-typography capabilities of current PDFTeX to provide a \textls command, which operates according to parameters declared in a \SetTracking command. Microtype’s ‘tracking’ facility expands the natural spacing font itself, rather than inserting space between characters.

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    Welcome to tex.sx! microtype and its \textls command were already pointed out in Assburger's answer.
    – lockstep
    Mar 9, 2012 at 23:23
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    Thank you for the nice welcome! With my answer I just wanted to highlight, that \textls builds on the natural spacing of the font. If I have to decide among a selection of working solutions, I would choose this one because of consistency.
    – Matthias Kolja Miehl
    Apr 2, 2012 at 19:57
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you can also use the soul package for letterspacing with xelatex since microtype is not supported yet by xelatex (as far as I know)

I would use letterspacing on small caps for titles.

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