Adjusting spacing between letters in text?

Is the problem better handled by avoiding the offending font face altogether? Also not just for the specific issue that you raise. I am becoming more aware of requests that published content should be readable by wider audiences (meaning it should meet US ADA compliance standards). Part of this push, as well as the push to meet stricter PDF/A standards, includes the demand that the final electronic document contains all font specs. With all the convolutions to meet these conditions, I find myself reverting back simply to the two old-school standards of either serif Times or sans serif Helvetica as the safest bets for everything.

Also, as someone who can be a pedantic pest about such things, I typically wag my finger angrily at graphs that go overboard with esoteric variations in color, in font face, in font sizes, or in font styles (let alone combinations of all these factors all at once). Are you really making the message of the graph content stand out better, or is the flare distracting?

Otherwise, if IP10 does not include a kern setting for display text, could it be munged by typing the text in a kern-aware editor (e.g. LaTeX), generating an image box of the result, and pasting the image box in the graph? I've done such things for complex math content that is to be added as annotations.

Just a few thoughts.

The graph is fairly simple, but I'm under a corporate template for this poster that needs to use all the same font (it's called EuroStyle font).  As far as 3rd party software, I can easily do this to the text in Photoshop, then insert that onto the graph, but I was wondering if there was something easier I was missing in Igor.  

Here's a screenshot. 

jasonjphillips wrote: but I'm under a corporate template for this poster that needs to use all the same font (it's called EuroStyle font)

My apologies. My lecture on the evils of those making uncharacteristically non-standard font choices is probably better passed to your corporate administration. If you will allow, I attach a recommendation for improving the visual separation of data (the lines), context (the title), and parameters (the other annotations). One recommendation that is not shown -- change the lines to "color safe" colors and/or use different line styles. For example, folks with certain color-blind traits will see three black lines on your graph.

It's funny, we have corporate requirements for the font/colors/logos, the "common look and feel", but nothing to support things like color blind folks.  Figures!

The details of the 3 lines isn't particularly important, just the fact that there are 3 and they average to the correct value.  The ambient is called out as an annotation because the X-axis is time, not temperature. 

Thank you. 

jasonjphillips wrote: It's funny, we have corporate requirements for the font/colors/logos, the "common look and feel", but nothing to support things like color blind folks.  Figures!

The US academic world faces an April deadline. Any electronic document posted thereafter for student consumption must be ADA compliant. A concern from this deadline is that all content in an electronic document must be able to be parsed to read-aloud for the visually impaired. So, while your original figure may not be flagged as non-compliant for using non-color safe colors, it would be flagged if it did not include an embedded alt text description in the electronic document itself. As to why I mention color-safe demands, some time ago, I had a student call me out on my slide content because I tended to use the basic three RGB + black color scheme. He could not distinguish the differences between various (important) aspects of my graphs because they were all the same to him. I'm returning now to that lesson as I seek to compile my notes into a publishable book or booklet format.

I might wonder in closing, if you would want something to consider as a way to leave a lasting legacy before retirement in a US corporation, start asking whether failing to heed to strict PDF/A and US ADA standards when generating electronic corporate documents, especially when documenting what should be archival resources about company standards, could put anyone in legal jeopardy later. If you want to make a change happen, aggravate the lawyers, not the visual marketing folks.

Hope your poster meets with good acclaim!

May I suggest an incredible dirty hack? You could add a very small space character in-between every character (or selected characters) of the text via a script to fake kerning. For tracking it is even easier, since you only need to replace the space characters. Something like this (adjust the percentage to your liking):

Note that the \M escape also resets any subscript, superscript and other related font settings, so it is more complicated in general. I think you don't have that in your labels. So you just need a script which...

• extracts text from the annotation or textbox
• inserts the spaces
• writes them back into the annotation or textbox

If you have a small example experiment, I could give it a try.

I can also suggest a hack - I would not call it dirty, but rather arduous. You can insert the different kerning spaces with Unicode characters. Look for the UTF-16 encodings of Em space, En Space, Third Space, Quarter space, Sixth space, thin space and hair space. You can then insert these in the "Add Annotation" window by choosing "Character" and "Enter Character".

I hope that this also works for the font that you have to use.

Best,

Klaus

Edit: I found this collection - probably more space than you want: https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/category/Zs