Kerning improves the appearance and design of your text, which might otherwise look awkward. No matter what your job title, it’s important to understand the power of kerning. Kerning can help you create better designs, produce more visually appealing copy, or construct better presentations.
What does kerning do in typography?
Kerning is the spacing between individual letters or characters. Unlike tracking, which adjusts the amount of space between the letters of an entire word in equal increments, kerning is focused on how type looks — creating readable text that’s visually pleasing.
What is the difference between kerning and tracking in typography?
While kerning refers to adjusting the spacing between letter pairs, tracking refers to the overall letter spacing in a selection of letters. … When applying tracking values, the spacing throughout the text will be equal.
What is kerning vs tracking?
Kerning adjusts the spacing between any two letters while tracking affects spacing for more than two letters. … Optical kerning adjusts spacing based on letter shapes and is generally a good option for large display text.
What is tracking in typesetting?
Tracking is a term used to identify the way you decrease or increase the horizontal spacing between a range of letters or characters. Usually, this technique is a method designers leverage to adjust and fine-tune the letter spacing of a logo, or font on a website. It works alongside kerning and leading.
What are the rules of kerning?
10 kerning tips for improving your typography
- Take care of leading and tracking before kerning. …
- Don’t let your font software kern for you. …
- Create equal perceived space between letters. …
- Understand spatial relationships between different letters. …
- Kern your type upside down. …
- Kern in groups of three.
Why is it called kerning?
The source of the word kern is from the French word carne, meaning “projecting angle, quill of a pen”. … At that time, the word kerning only referred to manufacturing the sorts with kerns, while adjusting space between letters during compositing was called inter-spacing or letter spacing.
What is bad kerning?
KERNING: The process of adjusting the spacing between characters in a proportional font, usually to achieve a visually pleasing result. … Bad kerning = Good laughs!
What are the types of kerning?
There are three types of kerning:
- Metrics kerning uses kern pairs, which are included with most fonts. Kern pairs contain information about the spacing of specific pairs of letters. …
- Optical kerning adjusts the spacing between adjacent characters based on their shapes. …
- Manual is a pretty self explanatory type of kerning.
What does tracking mean in typography?
In typography, letter spacing, character spacing or tracking is an optically-consistent adjustment to the space between letters to change the visual density of a line or block of text.
What does leading mean in typography?
In typography, leading (/ˈlɛdɪŋ/ LED-ing) is the space between adjacent lines of type; the exact definition varies. … In hand typesetting, leading is the thin strips of lead (or aluminium) that were inserted between lines of type in the composing stick to increase the vertical distance between them.
Is letter spacing kerning?
Letter-spacing is the process of simultaneously adjusting the overall space between groups of letters. … Kerning is the process of adjusting space between specific letter pairs to improve legibility in words that have inconsistent spacing, which makes the text look awkward and unprofessional.
What is leading and kerning?
– Kerning is the adjustment of spacing between the given pair of characters. … It not only refers to the spacing between two letters but also the process of adjusting these spaces. Leading, on the other hand, refers to the vertical spacing between lines and is measured from the baseline of each line of text to the next.
What is the space between lines of text called?
The vertical space between lines of type is called leading (rhymes with sledding). Leading is measured from the baseline of one line of text to the baseline of the line above it. Baseline is the invisible line on which most letters sit.
What is kerning in MS Word?
Kerning refers to the way spacing between two specific characters is adjusted. The idea is to give a better looking result by reducing the spacing between characters that fit together nicely (such as “A” and “V”) and increasing the spacing between characters that don’t.
What do spaces between letters mean?
1 : insertion of space between the letters of a word. 2 : the standard distance between adjacent characters (as in composed text) : tracking — compare kerning.
What is kerning in Cricut?
Kerning refers to the spacing between letters or characters in printed text. In Design Space, we’ve optimized kerning for system fonts and many Cricut fonts so the spacing between letters or characters is automatically more natural.
What does ligature mean in pages?
You can use ligatures, a decorative joining of two characters to form a single typographic character, to affect character spacing. You can use ligatures in your document if the font you’re using supports them.
What is normal letter spacing?
default letter-spacing: normal; The spacing between the characters is normal. letter-spacing: 2px; You can use pixel values.
Why do we use character spacing?
Character Spacing | Spacing lets you stretch or compress text. It’s a handy trick for headings, it makes them look bigger without increasing the font size. Or compress text so more fits into limited space.
Why is kerning and tracking important?
Kerning, leading and tracking are all ways to manipulate the spacing between characters. These special adjustments are an important tool to help create better readability and a more aesthetically pleasing design.
What is tracking and how is it used with typography?
Tracking is the typographer’s term for letter-spacing. Sometimes confused with kerning (which is used to adjust spacing between individual letters), tracking adjusts the letter-spacing uniformly over a range of characters. Tracking affects the visual density of a word, phrase or paragraph.
What does 10 12 mean in type size and leading?
The unit of measure for leading in most programs is points—same as for measuring type size. When you specifying a typeface’s measurement and leading, you’ll write Helvetica 10/12—the first number is the point size and the second number is the leading size.