Kerning Pairs

Most well-made fonts have “kerning pairs” built into them. That is, as designers create fonts, they build in tighter spacing between certain pairs of letters that are known to cause inconsistent gaps, such as Ta, To, Yo, we, and many others. Not all fonts have kerning pairs built in, and some have poorly adjusted pairs. Some fonts have 200-300 kerning pairs, others have over a thousand. Just because a font has an extraordinary number of kerning pairs does not mean it’s better. In fact, when there are many thousands of pairs it can take longer to display the text on the screen, and it will also take longer to print.

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