Kerning

Kerning ( in English and in many applications kerning) is a technical term from the typography and called there the process to reduce the horizontal distance ( the white space) between several letters ( Standarddickte ) by optical bonding, so that it appears even and so the viewer is perceived as pleasant.

Example

The string VA illustrates the kerning:

Other examples of kerning:

Av, AV, AW, AW, LT, LV, Ly, Ta, Te, To, Ty, T., Va, Vo, V. Ya, Yo, Y.

Kerning in the lead sentence

In the days of hot type the character width ( set width ), including the non-printed distance to the adjacent letters on the left and right ( meat) was usually determined by the physical width of a single letter. Kerning was hardly possible for longer texts, as these would have been too costly. It therefore reached only at relatively large letters on the application. Here, the cone (shank ) was cut so that the letter partly projected into the area of the adjacent character, was so before its cone. From the so-called meat under the letter has been cut slightly, so that the characters could be moved closer together. For frequently occurring combinations of letters kerning pairs were cast as ligatures in lead.

Kerning in computer typesetting

Accordingly, TrueType, OpenType and PostScript fonts for the computer record information on the definition of kerning ( kerning pairs ) are also stored at the most. These are considered by many popular word processing programs, the needs are often set until explicitly. In the default Metafont happens for example with the ligtable definition in Microsoft Word format via character - character spacing - kerning x from font size. Additionally, most desktop publishing programs allow you to define kerning by hand.

Writings without kerning

For special purposes, there are also fonts without kerning, mostly these are not proportional, ie monospaced fonts (English: monospaced ), such as the typewriter font Courier.

Overlap

In contrast to the undercut, the overlap is an overlap of adjacent symbol without the normal distance was changed to each other. The small z the Garamond - italic projects, for example, with its curved bottom line has always been in the box to the right of the next character into it.