Char. spacing (kerning?) basics?

[Geoff Hart <ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca>]

DaveC wondered: <<I have always used crude methods to get around screen 
font spacing problems, like choosing another font that looked better. 
Truthfully, I never understood why some characters are closer together 
than others, and how to fix the problem, not just avoid the symptom.>>

The problem is in the font* design. With proportional fonts (in which 
each letter occupies only as much space as required by its inherent 
width), font designers create "kerning tables" that govern how closely 
the characters fit together. If the kerning tables are designed poorly 
or are designed for a different use than what you're doing (e.g., 
display type vs. body text), then the display won't look particularly 
good.

* Here, I'm distinguishing between the typeface (the actual design of 
the characters) and the font (the computer implementation of that 
design). Some typefaces have inherent problems (see below); other 
times, the typeface is fine, but the implementation leaves something to 
be desired.

There's no way around such spacing problems other than to manually kern 
the problem characters or (if you've got the energy) to use font design 
software to edit the kerning tables. Unfortunately, kerning doesn't 
translate to onscreen display unless you're using Acrobat PDF. Browsers 
use the default kerning tables that come with a font; so far as I'm 
aware, you can't download a custom kerning table for use in your 
browser or preserve manually applied kerning in a browser.

However: <<How can I fix a font's spacing on-screen, so that it is 
uniform.>>

Later in your question, you mentioned that you're using American 
Typewriter, which is a nonproportional or "fixed-space" font. In such 
fonts, all characters occupy the same width, whether they're skinny (l) 
or wide (m). Such fonts are generally a poor choice for type display, 
since they're designed to emulate a typewriter, not to be optimally 
legible; they sacrifice legibility by including highly variable amounts 
of white space around each letter.

You can't really fix spacing problems with such fonts other than 
through massive amounts of manual kerning. But even then, the same 
problem arises: if you're not using PDF, you're SOL. What you can do is 
choose a smaller font size so that the spacing problems are minimized. 
Each typeface is designed for optimal legibility at a specific range of 
sizes; for nonproportional fonts, this range is typically less than 12 
points (_very_ roughly the maximum size you could get on an IBM 
Selectric typewriter).

<<Currently I'm using American Typewriter, and the spacing is uneven 
across a single line, using basic plain 14 pt text. What are my 
options?>>

The best option is to choose another font. There are many fonts 
suitable for online display; nonproportional fonts are, as a class, 
suboptimal for online reading and should be replaced by a more legible 
font. If you must use them, pick a size that they're designed to 
support; for your font, that would almost certainly be 12 point or 
smaller.

--Geoff Hart   ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca
(try geoffhart -at- mac -dot- com if you don't get a reply)


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