User Guide

Editing Font Metrics
397
Kerning
Kerning information is used to adjust the space between specific pairs of
characters. As you can see in the following picture some characters may be
well spaced with just the bearings rectangle but other characters are not.
To fix this problem a special technique called kerning has been developed.
Kerning defines the modification of inter-character space in specific pairs.
A good example is the AV pair. In the following picture you can see two
examples of inter-character spacing, with and without kerning:
With kerning Without kerning
You can see that only the kerned image is optically correct because it can
compensate for the problem caused by the special form of the V and A
characters printed in sequence leaving too much space between the letters.