Each letter is designed with a small amount of blank space on the left and right sides. This spacing is set by the font’s designer and is part of the letter itself; it cannot be changed. In technical terms, any character (letter, punctuation mark, number) is called a glyph, and the space included at the right and left are the glyph’s sidebearings. A goal for the type designer is to create optically-consistent spacing between a large number of glyphs combinations. To do this a type designer adjusts the spacing between certain pairs of glyphs through kerning, essentially overriding these sidebearings when certain letters appear together. Fonts are not created for all situations. Optically-consistent changes with the size, weight, and style of the typeface. A font may be designed for display at small or large sizes, or it may not be well-spaced. A goal for the page designer, after selecting the right font, is to set the type so that there is optically-consistent spacing throughout the text as displayed in that particular design. The page designer can adjust the spacing between letters in a number of ways.
Kerning
Kerning is the adjustment of space between two characters. While you cannot change the space of a glyph’s sidebearings and kerning tables, you can override the font’s kerning. This comes in two forms: between two letters (kerning) and between multiple letters overall (tracking).
To kern, you click between the characters and then adjust the character palette’s value for kerning. 
This number is in thousandths of an em (1/1000 em). You can type in a number. For example, a quarter em would be 250. Or you can arrow up or down in increments. Kerning can also be set to optical, 0, or metrics. Metrics meaning: use the values the designer built into the font. 0 meaning: avoid the built-in kerning information of a font. Optical meaning: ignore any supplied values and have InDesign calculate spacing mathematically based on pairings of Roman character forms.3
Letter Spacing
Also called: letter spacing, character spacing or tracking
means adjusting the space between a series of characters
Letter spacing, also called character spacing or tracking, is an adjustment to the space overall between letters—it is applied on top of the kerning. Letter spacing adjustments are used to change the visual density of a line or block of text.
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