Non-Designer’s Type Book, The, Second Edition

Manual Kerning

Kerning is a totally visual skill. The computer does the best it can with what it has to work with, but the end result, especially for larger type sizes, depends entirely on your eyes and your judgment. So even if your application has used auto pair-kerning, you must usually kern the larger type manually, selecting the space between two letters and adjusting it to match the visual space between the others.

Every page layout application and many illustration programs have keyboard shortcuts for kerning type on the screen. Sometimes you must insert a numeric value into a dialog box to add or remove the space, and some applications use both methods. Whatever it is, find out and use it.

When you kern manually, you must either select ...