On Sun, 2006-10-29 at 14:10 -0500, Joe Klemmer wrote:
> What is "kerning"?
Simply put - the spacing between characters, but taking into account the
shapes of the characters to fit them together in an aesthetically
pleasing manner.
Simplistic ASCII art drawing of some kerned characters:
XXXXXXXXXX
XX XX XX
XX
XX XXXX XXXX
XX XX XX XX XX
XX XX XX XX XX
XX XX XX XX XX
XX XX XX XX XX
XXXX XXXX XXXX
Versus unkerned:
XXXXXXXXXX
XX XX XX
XX
XX XXXX XXXX
XX XX XX XX XX
XX XX XX XX XX
XX XX XX XX XX
XX XX XX XX XX
XXXX XXXX XXXX
That's not "monospaced" by the way. Monospaced characters are all the
same width. This is about the spacing between the characters,
regardless of how wide they may be.
Different character combinations have different kerning values (the gaps
between Wa and To are probably different, likewise for many other
characters). This is dependent not only on which character, but the
shapes that they're drawn in (the style of the font). Hence this
information has to be provided with the font.
Years ago, I used a program called PageStream on the Amiga that let you
manually adjust the kerning of characters (you were able to define the
rules for certain characters in certain fonts, not just the general
inter-characters spacing, overall). It was a handy feature for dealing
with a badly planned font. But not something that you'd want to have to
do for each and every font that you have, and for each and every
character combination.
I'd ditch any badly kerned font, and use something that had been created
properly.
--
(Currently testing FC5, but still running FC4, if that's important.)
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