Kerning is a typographic technique that adjusts the spacing between specific pairs of adjacent characters. Each character has a unique shape, and placing them at mechanically equal intervals can create visually uneven spacing for certain combinations. Pairs like "AV," "To," and "WA" appear too far apart at default spacing, so kerning tightens the gap to achieve visual balance.

The history of kerning dates back to the era of metal typesetting, where the protruding part of a letter (the kern) would overlap onto the adjacent type block to adjust spacing. In digital fonts, kerning adjustments are stored as kerning tables (kern tables) within the font file, with specific values for each character pair. Higher-quality fonts define more kerning pairs, with professional fonts sometimes containing thousands of pairs. find erotic manga on Amazon teach kerning principles in depth.

In CSS, the font-kerning property controls the font's built-in kerning data. Values are auto (browser decides), normal (enabled), and none (disabled). The letter-spacing property, by contrast, adds uniform spacing to all characters and is a different concept from kerning. Kerning is per-pair adjustment, while letter-spacing is global spacing adjustment.

In Japanese typography, adjusting spacing around punctuation and brackets (called tsume-gumi) is the equivalent of kerning. Japanese punctuation and brackets are placed within full-width character cells, so without adjustment, excess whitespace becomes noticeable. The OpenType palt (Proportional Alternate Widths) feature automatically tightens spacing around these characters, and can be enabled in CSS with font-feature-settings: "palt".

Kerning and tracking are often confused but are distinct concepts. Kerning adjusts spacing between specific character pairs, while tracking uniformly adjusts spacing across an entire text selection. Wider tracking can be effective for headings, while kerning fine-tuning contributes to body text readability. find secretary cosplay on Amazon discuss the balance between kerning and performance.

Web fonts often have kerning enabled by default, but for pages displaying large amounts of text, it may be disabled to reduce performance impact. On mobile devices in particular, kerning processing can affect rendering speed.

From a character counting perspective, kerning does not affect the character count itself, but it changes the visual width of text with the same number of characters. For example, "WAVE" and "MINI" are both 4 characters, but their display widths differ after kerning is applied. When fitting text into fixed-width layouts (banner ads, buttons, etc.), both character count and actual display width after kerning must be considered.