Detailed analysis of a font by experts can get down to a question of artistic preference rather than a simple ‘wrong or right’ judgement. To some extent, kerning is an issue of design and taste. Each person’s brain processes the image in a slightly different way … at one extreme end you have people with dyslexia. Without kerning our brains might not as easily group letters together into words and sentences.

Ideally, there would be nothing wrong with letters spaced equally but our brains don’t work that way. Kerning fixes a problem with how we humans perceive text. See our look at the title for 2001: A Space Odyssey for an example of Office’s automatic kerning vs manual kerning. More sophisticated graphics packages allow for manual kerning or adjustment. Microsoft Office takes the kerning information in the font and calculates the kerning necessary in Word, PowerPoint or Excel. That’s the way it is with a fixed space or typewriter font like Courier NewĪutomatic kerning is what we’re talking about here. It’s easy to think of each letter being in a little box separate from others. We’ll try to make the differences clear but if you know a bit about fonts you might like to skip to 2001: A Space Odyssey and kerning and Kerning settings in Microsoft Office. Once you understand kerning, you start seeing kerning and especially bad kerning everywhere. It’s hard to see the differences that font experts are talking about. Also how to choose fonts with better kerning.įor font novices, issues like kerning can seem mysterious.

We’ll show you why kerning is important, the difference between positive and negative kerning, why size matters and why us humans are to blame for kerning. We’ll return to 2001 kerning in a follow up article. That got us looking at kerning generally. Our ‘ 2001: A Space Odyssey’ design article got feedback from two readers about the kerning in our remake of the title card. It’s necessary because letters take up different amounts of space and the letter shape can clash with the ones either side.Īt often one topic leads to another. Kerning adjusts the horizontal space between letters so they look right to the human eye. We’ll explain kerning and why you mostly don’t have to worry about it. Kerning is a font setting that’s important in Word and PowerPoint.

Fonts in word 2016