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What is Kerning?

Kerning is the typographic process of adjusting the horizontal spacing between specific pairs of characters to achieve visually consistent spacing. Unlike tracking (which adjusts spacing uniformly across all characters) or word spacing, kerning is targeted — it corrects for the optical illusion that certain character combinations appear to have more or less space between them than they actually do.

The classic example is "AV": the diagonal strokes of A and V create a large visual gap when they sit at their default spacing, even though no extra space was added. Kerning pulls them closer together so the gap looks similar to the spacing between, say, "nn."

Why Kerning is Necessary

Characters are designed in isolation but read in combination. A letter's bounding box (the rectangle enclosing its glyph) doesn't account for the white space created by its specific shape. Pairs that frequently require kerning include:

Font Kerning Tables

Professional fonts include kern tables (or the more modern GPOS table in OpenType) that specify adjustments for hundreds or thousands of character pairs. A typical professional typeface might contain 5,000–20,000 kern pairs.

The adjustment is measured in font units (usually 1/1000 or 1/2048 of an em). Negative values bring characters closer; positive values push them apart.

Kerning vs. Tracking vs. Leading

Kerning in Practice

CSS provides two mechanisms:

/* Enable font's built-in kerning tables (recommended) */
p {
  font-kerning: normal; /* default in modern browsers */
}

/* Disable kerning */
p {
  font-kerning: none;
}

/* Manual letter-spacing (tracking, not true kerning) */
h1 {
  letter-spacing: 0.05em;
}

Manual kerning in design tools like Adobe Illustrator or InDesign: place the cursor between two characters, then use Alt/Option + Arrow keys to adjust. InDesign shows the kern value in the Character panel.

Optical vs. Metric Kerning

Most professional design software offers two kerning modes: - Metric kerning: uses the kern pairs built into the font file (fastest, most consistent) - Optical kerning: software analyzes the actual glyph shapes and calculates spacing algorithmically (better for fonts with sparse kern tables, especially display sizes)

Quick Facts