What Is Kerning?

Kerning exists because letters are not boxes. A font gives every glyph a rectangular advance width, and if the letters were simply lined up one after another, shapes like A and V would sit with a triangular hole between them while H and I would look tightly packed. Kerning corrects this by moving a specific pair closer together or further apart, so the area of white space between letters looks even, rather than the distance between their edges.

The name comes from metal type, where a “kern” was the part of a letter that hung over the edge of its body, as on a swash italic f. Today the word means any per-pair spacing adjustment.

Where kerning matters most

Kerning problems show at large sizes: logos, posters, book covers, wedding signs and anything you draw by hand. At 10-point body text a missing kern on one pair is rarely noticeable. At 120 points it is the first thing a trained eye sees.

Pairs that usually need tightening:

Pairs that sometimes need loosening are the opposite: two round or straight shapes, such as rn in a tight face, can touch and read as the letter m. This is a classic kerning error, which is the origin of the joke “keming”.

Metric kerning, optical kerning and manual kerning

Font makers store kerning in a table of pair values, usually in the font’s GPOS table. Software applies these automatically, called metric kerning. Design tools also offer optical kerning, which ignores the font’s table and judges spacing from the actual outlines. Neither is perfect, and display-size work is nearly always adjusted by hand.

Kerning in hand lettering

When you draw letters you are the kerning table. A practical method: draw the skeleton of the whole word first, then judge spacing by eye. Squint, or turn the word upside down, and look for a dark clump or a light hole. Move the offending letter and redraw. Because you plan the word as one shape, you can also let a letter tuck under the arm of its neighbour, which no automatic kerning table would try. Our what is lettering guide explains why this word-first approach separates lettering from typesetting, and the lettering image maker lets you set word spacing against real fonts.

Kerning and fancy Unicode text

Styled Unicode, such as bold or script text from the cursive text generator, has no kerning controls. The characters are ordinary code points, so the app’s font decides the spacing. Some fonts include kerning for the Mathematical Alphanumeric characters and many do not, which is one reason fancy text can look slightly uneven from one device to another. Adding spaces to widen it is closer to tracking than kerning, because the same gap applies between every letter.

Common confusions

• Kerning is not tracking. Kerning is one pair; tracking is everywhere at once.
• Kerning is not line spacing. That is leading, and it works vertically.
• Equal distance is not equal spacing. Evenly measured gaps look uneven, because a gap beside a round letter holds less visible white than one beside a straight stem.