fontspecletterspacing
As I'm reading the fontspec manual it seems like I should be able to loosen the tracking of a line of type like this:
\documentclass[border=1mm]{standalone}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\addfontfeature{LetterSpace=50.0}
\begin{document}
Full fathom five thy father lies
\end{document}
but it doesn't work. What needs to change?
This is due to a bug (or, if one were more polite: incompatibility) in luatex. I've just reported it on the luatex list.
Edit: ... and I got an answer, persuading me to be more polite, indeed - it's not a bug but microtype's using a legacy command.
The simple solution is: load the fonts with Renderer=Basic (side effects are yet to be discovered).
You can use the microtype package with it's letterspace=<value> option. Legal values are between -1000 and 1000, specified in thousandths of an em, with the value 0 keeping the text as it would normally appear. microtype provides the command \textls{<letterspaced text>} and the switch \lsstyle:
\documentclass{scrartcl}
\usepackage[letterspace=150]{microtype}
\usepackage{kantlipsum}% to provide sample text
\begin{document}
\kant[1]
\lsstyle
\kant[1]
\end{document}
One should not know how to space out letters without knowing the typograhic rules when to apply it. Many LaTeX users will be well aware of them but some might not so I am going to repeat them here. Not covering exceptions the basic rules are:
Never space out lowercase letters! Instead of a single word you will get a series of single letters. If you actually want to typeset a series of letters there are better ways than to space out a word.
Always (modestly) space out uppercase letters (and maybe small caps, too). Without they usually look too tight and letters like O may cause white holes in a word. Too much spacing again will turn a word into a series of single letters.
Best Answer
There's no font selection to add it to.
Obviously, you shouldn't use
\fontspecin this way for a base font, but for the purpose of the example, it should suffice.