What is Tracking in typography design?

Tracking is a technique which allows one to control the letter and word spacing in harmony. It increases or decreases the space between all letters in a word, paragraph, or page. The spacing between characters of a typeface, as preset by font vendors, might seem okay at point sizes 10 or 12. but gets thrown out of all proportions when you scale a font upwards. Thus, a tight tracking may be required for larger font sizes. Too little tracking is preferable to too much, but extreme in either way would spoil the text.

You can experiment with tracking to some extent with modern word processors. Microsoft Word lets you adjust character spacing by so many decimal fractions of a point while WordPerfect allows you to do so by using percentages of default values. Tracking and kerning can be combined.