Gutenberg: Add a way to control letter spacing

[iamtakashi]

I've been having fun with making themes and block patterns lately, but I'd like to have finer control over letter-spacing to express visual varieties and to achieve opinionated styling around type.

It'd be great to allow increasing/decreasing letter spacing.

Example of decreasing:

Example of increasing:

[aristath]

Personal opinion:
Letter-spacing, word-spacing and line-height are things that don't concern the majority of people. You'd never use it when writing a post, you'd never use it when creating a normal page. You'd use these options only when creating a one-off page with specific styling for a very specific purpose.

The "Decisions, not Options" philosophy is in place so that we always keep in mind that we should not over-complicate things.
Having a couple dozen of options is cool because we can do whatever we want, but at the same time it also slows down the daily stuff like writing a blog post by introducing visual (and code) noise to the mix.

[alaczek]

I agree it will be tricky to nail the balance and not over-complicate the simple tasks like writing a post with design options that might be used once, if at all. On the other hand letter spacing is a pretty basic tool from design point of view, and it enables designers to create nicer layouts and patterns, that will benefit users.

I guess I'm suggesting considering where letter spacing setting would make the biggest impact, and implement it there. For example, I think this would come in really handy in FSE, in header/footer design for things like site title and navigation blocks.

[ianstewart]

Letter-spacing, word-spacing and line-height are things that don't concern the majority of people. You'd never use it when writing a post, you'd never use it when creating a normal page. You'd use these options only when creating a one-off page with specific styling for a very specific purpose.

Pattern creation and Template/Template-Part editing in the Site Editor — and even block-based theme creation in the Site Editor? — are both those sort of "one-off tasks" where this support could be valuable. A one-off task that has a potential outsized impact.

I agree that most people might rarely use this from a creation standpoint. But when selecting from and then editing future block patterns or template-things this could be welcome.