What is Kerning? - Typography Glossary

Kerning is an attempt to set right the visual aberration that occurs when certain pairs such as A-V, a-y, T-o etc. appear to have space between them and T-T, w-y etc. appear to clash.

Kerning removes or inserts space between individual character pairs, and mainly applies to capital letters followed by lower-case letters and also to punctuation marks. Headlines need special attention, as a larger text exaggerates any unwanted gaps between letters. On the flip side, kerning too tightly can leave text looking cramped.

One should know that letter-spacing is related to the weight of type. Light faces contain more white spaces, whereas, bold faces have smaller counters within characters.

Most DTP type-faces come complete with Kerning information, consisting of tables that list spacing adjustments between relevant letters pairs. However, a kerning table is only valid for one font and in some cases manual kerning is necessary.