v138 · css · typography · i18n

Letter Spacing Live Editor

Adjust letter-spacing and watch 9 scripts respond in real time. Cursive scripts (Arabic, Devanagari, Hebrew, Thai, Urdu) ignore the value to preserve character-joining ligatures; non-cursive scripts (Latin, CJK, Greek, Cyrillic) apply it. Chrome 138 brings this in line with Safari and the CSS spec.

letter-spacing ignored in cursive: checking…
Cursive — spacing ignored
Non-cursive — spacing applied
Mixed — per run

Controls

4px
22px

Script samples at letter-spacing: 4px

Custom text preview:
Why cursive scripts need this: Arabic, Devanagari, and related scripts form their correct letterforms by joining adjacent glyphs via ligatures. Adding even a small letter-spacing breaks these joins, producing disconnected and sometimes unreadable text — as if you spaced apart the strokes of individual Latin letters. The Chrome 138 fix makes letter-spacing a per-run property: it is applied to Latin/CJK runs within a mixed-script paragraph but ignored for cursive runs in the same element, all under one CSS rule.

see also