Kerning

From open-encyclopedia.com - the free encyclopedia.

In typography, kerning is the process of adjusting letter spacing in a proportional font. In a well-kerned font, the two-dimensional blank spaces between each pair of letters all have similar area.

A simple proportional font will simply specify the right and left boundaries, called sidebearings, of each glyph. However, depending on the adjacent letter, the space may be reduced (and occasionally increased) to improve the overall appearance of the text. For example, A and V can be placed closer together so that the top left of the V is directly above the bottom right of the A.

Kerning is implicitly part of digital type design, and advanced typographic systems allow the specification of kerning. It is commonly confused with tracking, but these are two separate concepts. Most high quality fonts contain instructions for kerning which are applied automatically by the typesetting engine.

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