In font design it is pretty much clear what is kerning and what is letter-spacing. But which word is more correct to use when you’re talking about an abstract pair of letters (in custom lettering, logo design etc.)? Let’s say, we only have the word “hi” as a vector shape in Illustrator. Would you call the space between those letters kerning or letter-spacing? I would prefer the term
letter-spacing, since if it was a font, it wouldn’t be a kerning pair. But some people say it’s kerning, because it’s only a pair of letters.
It is probably a stupid question, I know.
Comments
adjusted distance (defined for a particular pairing): kerning.
Everyday usage of the term “spacing” obviously encompass defining the distance between two letterforms, but the typographic usage of the term implies something quite different (or, at the very least, more specific): an allocation of whitespace distributed equally within and around elements so that the regularity is consistent regardless of permutation.
“In typography, letter-spacing,usually called tracking by typographers, refers to a consistent degree of increase (or sometimes decrease) of space between letters to affect density in a line or block of text.
Letter-spacing should not be confused with kerning. Letter-spacing refers to a uniform adjustment to the spacing of a word or block of text affecting its density and texture. Kerning is a spacing adjustment of one or more specific pairs of adjacent characters that, because of the relationship of their respective shapes, would appear to be badly spaced if spaced normally. A classic example is a capital V next to a capital A, which need to be brought closer together.”
This evolved in the transition from cold metal to hot metal, since the latter was determined in the drawings on paper, not by facing down the sides of the sort or adjusting the registers of the type mould.
(I’ve never done any casting myself; maybe Ramiro could better describe the process of fitting a matrix.)
I sometimes use the term, in the context of my own workflow, to refer to the process of refining the spacing of a font in progress.
When I was consulting on the TIME magazine redesign a few years back, we were initially trying to maintain a similar copyfit with the replacement text font.
I wrote a simple script to calculate the average character-per-em of a given font (which I refined using a weighting scheme based on a set of English letter frequencies), which could then be used to calculate average character-per-pica for a given size.
This “copyfitting” data allowed me to readily evaluate various comparisons: At what size would Font X match the existing average copyfit? What is the relative copyfit between Font X and Font Y when the x-heights are made equivalent. Etc.
Seemed to me a better exercise than running out a bunch of pages by trial-and-error. At least, it provided good starting points for trial pages.
Even though copy fitting isn’t practiced the way it used to be, I still find those old calculating skills useful occasionally. I am, on the other hand, a relative dinosaur. ;-)
(In the end, the constraint around maintaining similar copyfit was lifted, thankfully — especially once the decision was made to change the leading grid.)
I still have my Haberule, Kent ;-)