Spacing letters in character styles?

I have a question about the title of your original post, "Spacing letters in character styles?" Are you actually using Character Styles?

If you are, the general rule of thumb with Styles: never apply a Character Style to a whole Paragraph.

Paragraph Styles are your main Styles in InDesign, in that they contain both character and paragraph formatting in one, easy to apply Style. Character Styles are just for exceptions to the "character" formatting of part of your paragraph. Like you'd like to select one or two words in the paragraph and apply italic.

I have a document that I designed. It has 3 paragraph styles and I need to set the spacing to 1.5.

That sounds like leading to me. 1.5 (or spacing and a half) is terminology that evolved from typewriters and word processors.

If that is what you mean, Matthew, select a sample paragraph and increase the leading until you get the desired leading (AKA line spacing):

Then right click the style in the Styles panel > Refine Style. Repeat for the other paragraphs that need adjusting.

InDesign using printing terminology and not typewriter/word processing terminology. For single-spaced type, set the paragraph to type size + 2 points. For example, 10 pt type on 12 point leading. To approximate 1.5 spacing, and an additional half line of leading (in this case 6 pts) for 10/18.

~Barb

Just a guess here:

From your question, I wondering if you've recently switched from Quark. If this is the case, InDesign Tracking is a totally different scale than Quark.

To convert Quark Tracking numbers into InDesign Tracking, multiple your Quark Tracking numbers by 5. In other words, Quark's Tracking of 1.5 would be 7.5 Tracking in In Design. (1.5 X 5 = 7.5)

You can enter your tracking numbers in the Tracking Field in the Character panel.

You can either do it by style, or by exception.

By style: duplicate the existing style which doesn't have your desired 1.5 line spacing. In the duplicate style, change the Leading: edit box to 18 pt., which corresponds to 1.5 times the character size. Then apply the duplicate style to the relevant paragraphs.

By exception: Highlight the relevant paragraphs, and in the Paragraph panel change the leading from (14.4 pt), which is auto leading to 18 pt.

Either option will give you the result you're looking for.

Good Luck,

Randy

I assume that when you say spacing you mean tracking which is the space between letters. That can be adjusted within a paragraph style in the Basic Character Formats section of the New Paragraph Style dialog window.

The increments that you referred to 1, 5, 10, 25, etc. are not the only values that you can use though you can enter into the field any whole number that you wish but any fractions that you put in like 1.5 will be rounded off to the nearest number (in this case 2). You should be aware though that the units of measurement used in InDesign for tracking mean that a tracking value of 1.5 (or even 2) will be barely noticeable with most type fonts. Generally speaking increasing or decreasing tracking by units of 5 will be noticeable but as I said the look varies depending on type font. So it is possible to fix your tracking for existing paragraph styles by double-clicking on the names of the style in the Paragraph Styles panel. The same window shown above will appear but will actually be titled Paragraph Style Options.