How to apply kerning as a character style

It’s always frustrated me that kerning doesn’t show up in the character style dialog box as a field that I can enter a specific amount.

I often want to apply kerning to a specific glyph as part of a character style which could then be part of a Find/Change routine.

But how can you make a character style that contains a specific kerning amount?

Turns out, you can trick InDesign into doing something it doesn’t want you to do. (Or maybe it does want you to do it, but it wants you to work hard to do it.)

First, place your insertion point between two characters and kern the amount you want.

Then select those two characters and click to define a new character style.

Look at the summary of the character style definition. The character style lists the kerning amount as part of the character style definition, even though you can’t actually set that kerning amount in the basic character formatting!

From that point on, it’s pretty simple to use the character style whenever you want to apply kerning.

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