I would like letter-spacing when shared to display “x% (0.xxem)”
I’ve had to fix frontend design bugs from my junior developers because they put letter-spacing: 1% in the css and didn’t validate it does nothing. The difference is imperceptible to some people (and very obvious to me). We taught them 1% actually means 0.01em. Figma might as well help us help ourselves.
What’s more annoying about this is that, if you set a number variable with a value of 0.02 and apply it to the letter spacing property, it will be applied as a pixel value. In other words, even though the default unit for letter spacing is indeed %, there’s no way to apply a percentage value to it as a variable.
I found the same problem, which makes trying to use letter spacing values as variables more complicated.
Since we can’t specify a variable in %, we’d have to use modes to set various px values if we’re also using modes for font size.
Thought I should also add in, this has been bugging for about a year now and I only just learnt that % is equal to em, which would’ve saved me a lot of trouble over the years as I’ve just been eye-balling it until now.
At the very least, they could add an optional setting to change the unit.
Hey All, thanks for the feedback and sorry for the lack of acknowledgment here!
We’ll pass this onto the team for future consideration.
The problem with using pixel for letter spacing is that it won’t scale for for different font sizes.
Ems and percentages are the same only written differently 5% is .05em, 10% is .1em.