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

Range Kerning

Sometimes you start the fine-tuning process by selecting a “range” of text—a group of consecutive letters —and applying kerning values. This method, called range kerning, adds or removes the same amount of space between every pair of letters, regardless of their natural letterfit. If you range kern large type (14-point or over), you will probably need to finish the process by manually kerning certain combinations.

When you select a range of text (as shown to the left) and apply a kerning value or use keyboard shortcuts to kern, you are taking out the same amount of space between every pair of letters. This is the first step in the process—you will still need to manually kern the characters for a perfect letterfit.