Spacing is a fundamental factor in lettering and it influences the end result almost as much as the design itself. Limiting adequate spacing between the characters that make up our work is decisive in terms of readability. A set of characters with too small a spacing will prevent a good reading since our eye will not differentiate exactly where one character ends and another begins. In the same way, excessive spacing will make it quite difficult to link the characters and we will not know exactly where one word begins and another ends.
Within this question there are two anglicisms that are essential for us to know: Tracking and kerning. But what exactly are they and what are the implications of each of them?
El tracking could be translated into Spanish as prose and is the space that is systematically added between two characters. It will depend of course on the aesthetics and the purpose that we have in our project. Our alphabet contains certain characters that, when combined with each other, generate problems or optical defects and that cannot be solved with general tracking, and it is in these types of situations that kerning gains great importance.
Contrary to what happens with tracking, kerning it does not have a specific translation in our language. We can understand it as the value of spacing that is applied between two character pairs to compensate in some way for optical defects and in this way it does not appear that some letters are more united than others.
The truth is that there is no exact and universal formula that tells us what the perfect spacing is in all kinds of compositions. Everything will depend on our style and also on our typographic sensitivity. Some designers like somewhat condensed compositions while others prefer that the characters breathe a bit more. Still, there are many designers and scholars who have tried to establish methods to deal with the problem of spacing. For example, in 1986 Walter Tracy tried to lay the groundwork for correct spacing in his book Letters of credit. This adjustment method can be a good way to start working with kerning and tracking, although it also greatly influences the decision and vision we have about our project.