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I am just beginning to learn about fonts and typography so pardon if my question seems naive. I really like the look of Futura Bold for titles in a powerpoint presentation I'm making but the unequal spaces between letters is bothering me. Is there a sans serif font with equal spacing to replace Futura(preferably in the same gemoetric style)?

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    The variable distance between letters are painstakingly calculated by the font designer. It would look horrid if they were identical. What option you then have, is monospace fonts, but the combination of sans-serif and monospace is not that common..
    – benteh
    Commented Mar 22, 2014 at 21:28
  • No worries. As an aside; you could - and I think should - mathematically kern a sentence the way you think it should be. You will then discover the typographers nightmare :)
    – benteh
    Commented Mar 23, 2014 at 0:27
  • @RandomO'Reilly Nevertheless, if ct is really that tightly spaced in otherwise very airy font, something's wrong.
    – yo'
    Commented Apr 16, 2014 at 20:41
  • @tohecz interestingly, when I reproduce this in Futura default, the crossbar on the t-s are in fact shorter and therefore looks decent. Why the OPs image does not conform I do not know, unless there are internal variations from the default.
    – benteh
    Commented Apr 16, 2014 at 20:50

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As boblet points out, there really aren't fonts that have equal spacing between each letterform. The reason is that it would look funny.

The spacing between each pair of letters is calculated so that it 'looks' even--even when it's mathematically not (often called optical spacing). The better quality the font, the more of these individual calculations there are (they are called kerning pairs).

I don't know of any font that has purposefully set up equal spacing between the outermost edges of each letterform.

So, all that said, you are likely focusing on the wrong aspects of the letterforms. Take the 'tc' combination. Yes, the crossbar of the 't' is close to the 'c' but look at the stem of the t. That space is pretty good. If you were to put more space between the 'tc' then that gap would start to look way too wide.

Think of the space between each letterform as an 'average' spacing taking into consideration the entire letter. The goal is to balance the positive and negative space more than it is to make sure there is a equal mechanical gap between the outermost parts of each letter.

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Probably you should use one of the thousands of monospace fonts

definition

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    monospace fonts take up the same width for each glyph, but don't have equal spacing between each glyph.
    – DA01
    Commented Mar 22, 2014 at 21:42
  • @DA01 from the link I provided in the answer - "This contrasts with variable-width fonts, where the letters differ in size from one another, as do spacings in between many letters." Also, I said "probably" because it is easiest way to find the solution to the question
    – Ilan
    Commented Mar 22, 2014 at 21:45
  • Be that as it may, that doesn't change the fact that a monospaced font (especially if sans-serif) likely will not have equal spacing between each letterform. Each letterform's bounding box is equal in size, but each letter is typically going to vary in size (therefore producing unequal spacing).
    – DA01
    Commented Mar 22, 2014 at 21:48
  • Probably, we are talking about aspects of "partially wrong" question, because from your answer I understand that the author should find well-looking font with acceptable for him optical spacing %)
    – Ilan
    Commented Mar 22, 2014 at 21:53
  • That's a good point!
    – DA01
    Commented Mar 22, 2014 at 21:54

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