Kerning, the Hard Way
31 comments
·March 14, 2025seumars
Funnily enough the example given of good “L” and “T” kerning in the word SALTY is badly kerned, the letters are kerned too close to each other. The classic trick is to look at 3-letter groups at a time, one word at a time.
gundmc
I thought so too, but now if I look it seems as if every letter is just under two stripes with from its neighbor?
jedberg
I literally read this headline as "keming the hard way" and thought it was the most clever title ever.
AceJohnny2
That is the joke in the community ;) See also
https://www.ironicsans.com/2008/02/idea_a_new_typography_ter...
layer8
Isn’t kerning something that would be amenable to be approximately solved by machine learning? I.e. for a “good enough” default kerning? (Ignoring the extra difficulty from the stripes in TFA.)
euroderf
I've had the same idea for Finnish, where all-uppercase text has some really ghastly kerning issues, like YT and VY and KY and (gack!) LJ. I hope to see a font RSN.
user3939382
Kerning the hard way would be to hardcode the “numberOfChars factorial/!” number of custom kerning distances.
jasonthorsness
Ha the font looks great; but this seems to be pushing the boundaries what fonts themselves were designed to support, definitely "hard mode". What is the intended use case?
LegionMammal978
Classically, you'd do things like replace f+i with an fi glyph, or f+f+i into an ffi. Though I'm surprised that it can be used to split one glyph into multiple glyphs, then transform those glyphs again.
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oniony
Would it have been possible to fix this by instead swapping out the LT pair with a ligature?
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drpossum
keming
PaulHoule
I did a round of printing work two years ago which got me to notice (1) very few printed posters where people use serifed display fonts and (2) awful kerning by default with Microsoft and Adobe tools. When I did desktop publishing in the early 90s and early 00s I never noticed that kerning was so bad and wonder if I had bad taste back then or if it really got worse, like we can blame a patent troll for bad kerning -- I look at old books and see the r almost making love to the s next to it and think how much better it can be.
f30e3dfed1c9
I spent most of the 1990s and early 2000s working for a typesetting company whose work was college textbooks and monographs for academic presses. We applied modified kern tables to every single typeface we acquired. The tables from the font vendors were inadequate in various ways.
thesuitonym
Back then, computers didn't really do kerning as well as they do now, and desktop publishing wasn't as common or affordable. Today, publishing tools are so easy to use, and the default kerning is usually good enough that most people won't notice a problem, or if they do, they often don't know it can be fixed.
JadeNB
> When I did desktop publishing in the early 90s and early 00s I never noticed that kerning was so bad and wonder if I had bad taste back then or if it really got worse, like we can blame a patent troll for bad kerning ….
My suspicion is that there's always been bad kerning in most computer-generated text. Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1015/
adityaathalye
Soon as I saw the headline, I was keming here to say the same thing. You beat me to the pumch.
Stratoscope
aidos
I love bad kerning more than most, but a lot of those feel like someone just put a space in the wrong place.
That’s a shame, I like my kerning to sit in that sweet spot where people don’t notice it but once you point it out it gives them an unsettling feeling wherever they see it.
keming
> I like my kerning to sit in that sweet spot where people don’t notice it but once you point it out it gives them an unsettling feeling wherever they see it.
I’d love to see some examples of this.
whatnow37373
I don’t see how the benefits of kerning, if any, outweigh the enormous costs.
dsp_person
In my e-reader I changed the font to Roboto Mono and completely forgot it was monospace. It's not like reading feels any less efficient. Idk might even feel more efficient or comfy somehow.
Muromec
It looks nice. When everyrhing consistently looks nice, thise small things accumulate into one apple.
keming
Kerning lets letters be spaced more uniformly, which is easier to read for most of us.
It also allows letters to crowd each other like friends in a wacky group photo, a tree overhanging a sidewalk, or a cat's tail doing its weird contortions. Fonts are fun.
It’s worth the trouble I think, but there are options if you’d rather not support it.
exe34
it's one of many little things that add up to "oh your poster looks much nicer than the others" - but they can't put their finger on what exactly makes it nice.
russellbeattie
I can't help but point out that as someone who went to college for journalism and graphic design in the early 90s, and had to lay out galleys using strips of words and a razor blade, let me assure this isn't the hard way. Correcting a missing apostrophe or manually adding a hyphen while not throwing off an entire line requires both an eye for kerning and a steady hand.
Get off my lawn.
rasz
Kerning, the super easy way straight from 1986 Atari ST: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calamus_(DTP)#Calamus_Intellig...
The complexity comes from needlessly combining two separate things into one: a simple repeating background pattern and a typeface. It's a "serving suggestion" when really all that's needed is the corn flakes.