Kerning Underscore

Wei Huang

Do you kern underscores or is it important to not kerning them?

Robin Mientjes

The only hard rule I know is to set them flush by default, because there’s a specific Microsoft guideline that says they should. Otherwise, I do kern them.

Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian

Not kerning the underscore is just low.

James Puckett

I space mine to match the en and then don’t kern it in case someone is using it like a bullet. 

Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian

V_j
That is all.

Thomas Phinney

The reason to have them flush—or better, just slightly overlapping—is that people sometimes set rows of underscores as a quick "blank"... actually really common usage. Even by pro designers.

Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian

Of course you could have it not flush... and use kerning for that. :-)  Especially if doing so reduces kerning work with all the other glyphs. I do that with the em-dash, and even the tilde (makes a nice wavy line).

Beau Williamson

Oh, now I want to kern all my tildes. Wavy line is great.

Mike Wenzloff

Beau Williamson said:

Oh, now I want to kern all my tildes. Wavy line is great.

So why not make an alternate for the hyphen. Use the tilde outline and set it to overlap? Then add it into an aalt, stylistic set, etc.