Character spacing in Lyx

[thomas.hedden]

I am using Lyx and want to apply, to some text, a character attribute that is
variously referred to as "character spacing", "intercharacter spacing",
"inter-character spacing", or merely "spacing", and possibly other names
as well. When used on pairs of characters, it is also referred to as "kerning".
This attribute is widely used in typography, and is available in both
Microsoft Word and in OpenOffice.org Writer. When applied to some text,
for example "test text", it could spread the text out like this "t e s t t e x t".
Of course this effect can be imitated as I did here, by inserting spaces
between the letters. But doing this changes the text. That is, instead of
"test text", it would then become
"t[space]e[space]s[space]t[space][space][space]t[space]e[space]x[space]t".
I find this unacceptable. I have searched in the user interface and the
manual, and cannot find any information about this.
Does anyone know whether this feature is supported and how to apply
this attribute to text?
Thanks in advance for any suggestions.
Tom

[Rubberman]

Well, I looked at the version available on my system, 1.5.6, and can't find anything about kerning. However, since Lyx appears to be a front-end for TeX, and it allows you to insert TeX commands, you should be able to alter the kerning for the printed document. Unfortunately, I have no experience with this document editor so that's about as far as I can take you. You might want to post your question on the Lyx user forums: LyX | LyX – The Document Processor

[unlimitedscolobb]

Although I used LyX for almost a year some time in the past, I don't remember whether it is possible to alter character spacing with native LyX techniques. However, LyX allows seamless integration of LaTeX control sequences (IIRC), so the following suggestion might help you.

Searching for ``latex character spacing'' I could immediately find some TeX FAQ as the first link. Searching for ``lyx insert latex'' gave me the following A Simple Guide to Latex/Lyx. In the latter document look for the first Advanced Topic. Sorry for not posting the links, I'm not allowed to that since I have less than 15 posts

In short, you need to add the following to your preamble (Layout->Preamble according to link 2):

\usepackage{soul}

Then, when you need to increase character spacing, ``Click the red botton on the toolbar, enter appropriate latex comand'' (link 2), which in our case would be

\so{More space}

I tried this in LaTeX (texlive, Arch Linux) and it works. You might want to google for ``latex soul package'' and click the first link. (Again sorry for the absence links).