Spacing between characters can be manually adjusted with the Spacing control (Position tab under Format|Character). Currently the adjustment is limited to tenths of a point: the spacing may be increased or decreased by 0.1 pt, 0.2 pt., etc. It is not possible to increase or decrease the spacing by, e.g., 0.14 or 1.72 pts. The spacing adjustment is particularly useful for avoiding awkward line lengths as, for example, when a long word at the end a line just fractionally misses fitting within the margin. In an align-left paragraph, the long word is bounced to the next line, making the first line unattractively short. Sometime the problem can be corrected by tightening up the spacing by a fraction of a point. In some font/size combinations, the tenth of a point increment does not give sufficient control: one-tenth is not quite enough, but two-tenths squeezes the letters uncomfortably close together. Note that this is a different problem from a separate control that would increase or decrease the size of the spaces between words, while leaving the spacing of the letters within words unchanged. I believe this has been in a separate bug report.
So, I am requesting the following enhancement: The character spacing increment in LO Writer be changed from one-tenth of a point to one-hundreth of a point.
Character spacing conforms to these: http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/REC-xsl-20011015/slice5.html#section-N8185-Definitions-of-Units-of-Measure There doesn't seem to be any reason why we could not define the spacing by 0,0 1 pt accuracy as the formatting is translated to the markup as for example (0,3 pt): fo:letter-spacing="0.011cm" Setting to NEW. For reference: http://docs.oasis-open.org/office/v1.2/os/OpenDocument-v1.2-os-part1.html#property-fo_letter-spacing
This is definitely a bug. Likely the actual resolution is double of the resolution of the UI: 1/20 pt (1 twips), according to LibreOffice core, so it would be better/correct to set a 0.05 pt step on the user interface. But it's possible, that there is a conversion problem here, too: On the UI – setting 0.1 pt exported as fo:letter-spacing="0.11pt" in .odt; – setting 0.05 pt exported as fo:letter-spacing="0.11pt" in .odt, visualized as 0.1 pt on the UI; – setting 0.04 pt exported as fo:letter-spacing="normal" (i.e. ~0pt), visualized as 0 pt on the UI. By the way, the best solution would be implementing custom letter spacing to handle this requirement automatically after setting a minimum letter spacing for the paragraph, like DTP software do.