Talk:Kerning

message: Currently, the caption to the diagram / figure says:
"The glyph on the right is kerned to overlap the following character."
Should it in fact say:
"The glyph on the right is kerned to overlap the previous character."  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 89.101.19.116 (talk) 22:43, 5 February 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Little late on this response, but I think you are overlooking the fact that the type will be reversed when printed. That is, while the overlap is with the physically previous character as the type is laid out it is with the character that will be printed following this character. --Khajidha (talk) 11:01, 24 October 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  In Metal Typsetting 

message: :"However, many word processors, such as Microsoft Word or OpenOffice.org do not enable kerning by default."
OpenOffice 2.0 has pair kerning enabled by default. It would suprise me if older versions and Word don't? —Ruud 23:21, 1 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Kerning in wordprocessors 

message: I've removed the "Hog" image which User:Stevage added.  He said it was an "extreme" example, but much of what made it look so "extreme" was the fact that the letters were italicized.  Iticicized letters overlap even without any kerning - because the invisible "boxes" that they're contained within in are forward leaning paralelagrams instead of rectangles, whereas kerning involves more of an irregular interlocking between letters of different shapes and sizes so that they fit well together.  The text did look like it was kerned somewhat (assuming it's a typeface and not just hand-drawn letters), but I'd say about 75% of the overlap is do to italicization and not kerning.  In the future, images and discussion of kerning italicized letters might be a good idea, but the lead image should be non-italicized to avoid undue obfuscation.
Also, who ever made the image that's currently the lead (the "AV" and "Wa" examples"), I think it would be a good idea for them to modify it so that each example has at least three letters.  With only two letters present, it's a lot more difficult to see the difference between kerning and tracking.  Helvetica 05:25, 20 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Ok. For the lead image, can I suggest making a much simpler, more symbolic image, rather than one that attempts to explain the entire article in a picture? Seriously, just make an image with two letters - the absolute minimum, so that it "represents" kerning. Then use other images later in the article to really explain the concept. Stevage 06:14, 22 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Hog image 

message: Note that I am not a font expert, but the auto-kerned version of "WAR" in the example image looks better to me. The space between the W and A does not match with the space between the A and R in the manually kerned version. The longer I look at the auto kerned version, the more I find that something inbetween would be good. The auto-kerned version does not look perfectly "connected" whereas the manually kerned version is a bit "inhomogenous". (What are the technical terms for these?) Any comments from the experts?
::I definitely wouldn't consider myself an "expert" on typography by any means, but I did create the image - along with several others on here when I was bored and playing around with some graphic design software and some new fonts I downloaded.  If you look at the image at full resolution and, you can see that the W and the A (at the closest point) are actually farther apart than the A and the R in the manual version.  Though I see how it could appear that they're closer together - due to the heavy degree of overlap.  They maybe should be a bit farther apart still, but not as far apart as the auto-kerned version.  Helvetica 05:24, 12 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: http://www.rit.edu/emcs/admissions/bca/blog/item/that-kerning-is-tight  JMP EAX (talk) 22:56, 7 August 2014 (UTC)

text: And I'm almost tempted to add http://xkcd.com/1015/ to the article. JMP EAX (talk) 23:26, 7 August 2014 (UTC)

text: I am a professional type designer, and work a lot with spacing and kerning my typefaces. My view is that the third WAR is very greatly overkerned; optically, this creates an ungainly hole between A and R. Typefaces such as this, with very heavy, quite wide serifs and low contrast, are notoriously difficult to space and kern. But as will all kerning, it is generally better to kern things a little too loose than a little too tight. With digital, scalable fonts, it is best to make them work in small sizes, which typically needs looser kerning and spacing. For bigger sizes, manual kerning should be applied. My approach would be to kern quite a bit looser than in the auto-kerned example here. The bad kerning in the example makes me think this is a ripoff of Clarendon. For comparison, here is a screenshot of Linotype Clarendon with kerning applied. Devanatha (talk) 12:33, 4 May 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Which WAR is better? 

message: In a well-kerned font, the two-dimensional blank spaces between each pair of letters all have similar area. Why "two-dimensional"? What other dimensionality of blank space might be appropriate here? 86.137.107.36 21:29, 6 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: It does seem like there should be a better way of saying it, but I'd say the instinct at that point is to think purely in terms of the left-right distance between the characters (one-dimensional), instead of the actual total area of the space (which I think is the intended point). Either way, it could stand some cleanup from a better typographer than I. --Rindis 16:37, 7 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm late to the game on this discussion, but I seem to recall that the pairing "oo" was often lowered by a half point.  So the word "took" and "look" would have the oo's moved depending upon the position of the descender of the starting letter.  This was applied to both letters, but it stands to reason that there might be cause to lower a j slightly if tucked under a T with a very strong serif overhang on the top bar, and this would be part of the kerning table.Tgm1024 (talk) 21:36, 3 August 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Two-dimensional" spaces 

message: The opening paragraph states, "The word kerneling derives from..."  However, is this a typo which should actually read, "The word kerning derives from..." ? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by OnlineCop (talk • contribs) 14:41, 7 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Kerneling vs. Kerning 

message: However, it is rarely a sufficient alternative for manual kerning, as some characters may appear to an algorithmic comparison to be spaced very closely together, but to a human reader might appear to be spaced too far apart; especially when the only part of a glyph that is 'too close' is a diacritic sign.
This may have been true 15 years ago, but my personal experience in the field is that kerning these days is not manual. It's pair-specific and font-specific so that it always looks just right. In the occasional case where something doesn't look quite right there may be some "fudging" of the result, but that's usually when we're trying to make something fit into a space where it wouldn't normally; or where we're trying to spread things up to reduce unused space in a particular line or column. For the most part, the programmatic kerning does exactly what we want it to do - have a nice, tight appearance, and take up less space. 204.152.119.46 14:51, 21 September 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: "pair-specific" (as you put it) *is* manual kerning.  "Programatic Kerning" is a broken concept of an algorithm taking a look at how the glyph is layed out and deciding, for example, that this serif is too close, or that base is just far enough away, etc.  That is never a valid substitute for a human visual inspection and a manually crafted pairing table.  As soon as you have a human built kerning table, you have by definition been employing "manual kerning".Tgm1024 (talk) 20:16, 7 August 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: People who do graphic design can not stop themselves from excessively hand-kerning text.  People who are producing straight matter (plain blocks of text, as for a book or other document) do not ever manually kern.  Exception: people who are including a block of straight matter in their graphic design may not be able to help themselves from hand-kerning the entire block.  I think this conflict is just a case of different worlds colliding.  Battling McGook (talk) 02:13, 8 August 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Point of disagreement 

message: Does anyone agree that the upper left quadrant of :File:Track_Kern.png shows kerning, not tracking? 75.55.199.5 (talk) 21:14, 14 July 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  the top left of the upper diagram seems wrong 

message: I was looking at the image at the top for a minute until I realized that there was a transition from left to right in both cases. Maybe somebody should put arrows from left to right for the examples.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.43.137.82 (talk) 20:18, 25 June 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  confusing image 

message: Is the Wired interview really an inappropriate WP:PRIMARY for sourcing the neologism "keming"? It isn't the interviewee using the word in a response to a question, it's the interviewing journalist deciding to write "you may know him as the guy who invented the word keming, his coinage for bad kerning" in the article's introduction. --McGeddon (talk) 11:51, 1 February 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: It's little different from the interviewer saying, "My guest tonight is Smith. His new book, in stores now, is Such and Such." -- even weaker than your typical passing reference. This term was introduced in 2008. If it's got any traction there should no problem finding non-marginal sources by now. See WP:NEO. EEng (talk) 20:19, 1 February 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: See also related discussion at Keming#Kerning. 183.89.161.174 (talk) 07:00, 14 May 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Keming source 

message: The illustration on the right is captioned: "Three versions of "WAR" in the Clarendon typeface: The top version has no kerning, the middle version has auto-kerning applied, and the bottom version has manually adjusted kerning."  However, this is misleading since it implies that you can visually tell the difference between automatic and manual kerning, which is not the case.  In this case, the bottom example simply has tighter kerning than the middle example.  Both could have been equally the result of some automatic kerning algorithm, just as both could have equally been the result of someone manually kerning them.  136.186.72.46 (talk) 05:24, 28 May 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Illustration caption gives misleading info about auto-kerning 

message: I always dislike text like that found in this section, as software feature lists frequently change making the entry quickly obsolete. Further, the text lists a version number for IE, but doesn't list it for the others, this inconsistency is odd. Better text would show a table indicating things like "kerning was supported in Opera on such-and-such a date in version such-and-such." This makes it a historic record (which is unchanging) vs. a current-status snapshot (which gets quickly out of date) Jpbjoel (talk) 14:35, 12 October 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: Are you volunteering to work on it? Surely something like  would be better... JMP EAX (talk) 00:53, 8 August 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Kerning in browsers 

message: This section is either very misleading or entirely wrong.  It was never standard practice to notch or corner cut sorts for kerning.  Kerned letters simply had the face of the letter overhang the next sort.  Just as shown in the accompanying image.
If this practice existed at all, I've never heard of it.  Googling for "typesetting notched sort" or "typesetting corner cut sort"  produces nothing of any use at all.  I've never come across a single image that shows this might be the case.
There is a more modern practice called "sector kerning".  This was a primitive kerning algorithm that generalized letter shapes into sectors.  It's possible there was a mechanical type system over the years that did something like this, but if so, it was relatively obscure, and as I said, I haven't seen or heard of it.
Unless anyone can come up with a source for this, I'm going to scrap it completely and rewrite it.  Battling McGook (talk) 19:00, 10 January 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: Rewritten.  Will add references later.  Battling McGook (talk) 21:59, 14 January 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: For what it's worth I've seen "kerned" type, e.g. a W with a corner filed away by hand. It has also been called kerfing, after the name of the sort of metal cutting file you'd use to do it. Barefootliam (talk) 05:38, 8 April 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: I have now found some images on the web of fonts that are kerned in this way.  So far I've primarily seen large headline fonts done this way, primarily woodcut, but also one that looks like metal.  I did find one modern shop filing away corners of a a smaller font to kern letters together.  This is a completely custom thing - the sorts become unusable after that (although in their case it looked like  hot metal type so it didn't matter anyway).  If we can find a reliable source that talks about any of these practices and when they have been used, we can add that information to the article. Battling McGook (talk) 16:33, 8 April 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Notched Metal Typesetting 

message: Does anyone know how TeX82 handles kerning? (I know the newer XeTeX and so forth use OpenType and such.) JMP EAX (talk) 22:20, 7 August 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  TeX? 

message: My background for a large part of my software engineering experience has been in prepress (from the 80's on).  Back then, the groups I was part of referred to the kerning values in the opposite way that they're referred to here.
Kerning the "o" under the "T" (a closing in) was known as "positive kerning", and used positive values.  The values referred to how much to close glyphs together.  Similarly, "negative kerning" is what was applied to glyphs such as two sans-serif LC letter els next to each other or "el eye" parings to spread them apart a little.
I'm not saying that what I was used to back then was the way, but I thought I'd mention it in case others had that same experience.Tgm1024 (talk) 21:24, 3 August 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Quick note on positive vs. negative kerning semi-historically. 

message: Talk:Kerning to me  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.0.55.147 (talk) 19:33, 5 February 2015 (UTC)
thread_title: Malformed comments at top of talk page moved here

message: Is this just about horizontal spacing?  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 31.54.207.205 (talk) 12:56, 31 January 2018 (UTC)
thread_title: spacing

message: Could you kern in a non-proportional fount?  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 31.54.207.205 (talk) 12:59, 31 January 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, Anon. user, you shouldn't kern a Monospaced font because a Monospaced font has a fixed letter width, meaning that all letters have the same width... -24.180.87.149 (talk) 22:45, 25 January 2019 (UTC)
thread_title: proportional fount