The number is expressed in font units, one unit being a certain fraction of an em (one em is the type size currently used). In digital typography, kerning is usually applied to letter pairs as a number by which the default character spacing should be increased or decreased: a positive value for an increase, a negative value for a decrease. With the arrival of digital fonts, it became much easier to kern many glyph combinations. It was therefore only employed on letter combinations which needed it the most, such as VA or AV. In metal typesetting, kerning was labour-intensive and expensive because the matrices had to be physically modified. 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.īecause this method was not well-suited to some pairs of letters, ligatures were supplied for those glyph combinations, such as the French L’, or the combinations ff, fi, fl, ffi, ffl, and others. Those overhanging metal pieces were called kerns. In the days when all type was cast metal, the parts of a typecasting sort that needed to overlap adjacent letters simply hung off the sort slug's edge. The French term originated from the Latin cardo, cardinis, meaning "hinge". The source of the word kern is from the French word carne, meaning "projecting angle, quill of a pen". The glyph on the right is kerned to overlap the character following it (glyphs are mirrored for printing).
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