Kerning

Look up kerning in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
Not to be confused with kenning, Kerning (dairy), or Kerning City.
Kerning brings A and V closer, with their serifs over each other.

In typography, kerning is the process of adjusting the spacing between characters in a proportional font, usually to achieve a visually pleasing result. Kerning adjusts the space between individual letterforms while tracking (letter-spacing) adjusts spacing uniformly over a range of characters.[1] In a well-kerned font, the two-dimensional blank spaces between each pair of characters all have a visually similar area. The term "keming" is sometimes used informally to refer to poor kerning (the letters r and n placed too closely together being easily mistaken for the letter m).[2]

The related term kern denotes a part of a type letter that overhangs the edge of the type block.[3]

  1. ^ "Fonts : Type topics: Glossary". Adobe. Retrieved 2011-09-16.
  2. ^ McGinnie, Louise (2013-11-28). "Kerning, spacing, leading: the invisible art of typography". The Conversation. Retrieved 2023-12-16.
  3. ^ "kern | Definition of kern in English by Oxford Dictionaries". Oxford Dictionaries | English. Archived from the original on July 13, 2018. Retrieved 2018-07-13.