Smushing Text Together

I'll bet you already knew that "smushing" is a technical term, right? It is, I believe, a combination of the words "smashing" and "pushing." In this usage, it simply means to squeeze text together by reducing the distance between characters. Typographers refer to this as kerning.

Normally, each font installed on your system has a default distance between characters. This distance is calculated based on the typeface used and on the way the font designer wants the typeface to appear. There are simply times when it is necessary to push text closer together, however. In order to do that, simply follow these steps:

1. Select the text you want to condense.
2. Display the Font dialog box. (The easiest way is to press Ctrl+D.)
3. Make sure the Character Spacing (Word 2007) or Advanced (Word 2010 or a later version) tab is selected. (See Figure 1.)



Figure 1. The Advanced tab of the Font dialog box.

4. Using the Spacing drop-down list, choose Condensed.
5. Using the By control, just to the right of the Spacing drop-down list, specify how much you want your text condensed, in points.
6. Click on OK.

There are a couple of things to keep in mind when using the capability. First, the results of condensing your text can depend, in large part, on the characteristics of the font to which you are applying it as well as the font's size. For instance, you may be more satisfied with the results if you are condensing a large font rather than regular text fonts.

Also, the amount you condense (in step 5) can be specified in rather small increments. You may have noticed that after you specified you wanted to condense the selection (step 4), that Word automatically placed a one-point value in the By control. Condensing by this amount is rather small, since a point is only 1/72 of an inch. Word lets you specify values down to 0.05 points, however, which means 1/1440 of an inch. Thus, you can set the By control to .05, .1, .15, .2, .25, etc. This gives you very fine control over how much the text should be condensed.

Finally, using the up and down arrows of the By control will step through tenth-point increments. If you want to use values to 0.05 points, you need to actually type a value into the By field.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (12462) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, 2021, 2024, and Word in Microsoft 365. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Word here: Smushing Text Together.