The kerning on the pope’s tomb

michele casanova

I know it's not strictly typography, but it seemed like something worth mentioning.

The kerning on the pope’s tomb is a travesty

It seems like a bizarre mistake for a tomb that should stand the test of time.

Joshua Langman

Given that it appears to be mechanically engraved Times New Roman, it arguably is typography.

Dave Crossland

Is it mechanically engraved? The article wasn't clear to me

michele casanova

Dave Crossland said:

Is it mechanically engraved? The article wasn't clear to me

Searching online I found no information on how the word was actually engraved.

Thomas Phinney

I remember seeing at least one photo that showed what looked like a V cut, the kind of thing produced by a chisel, as one would expect. (As opposed to say, sandblasting, as is often used for less formal work these days.)

John Savard

It seems hard to believe that the letters were spaced in this manner to send a message about humility.

To me, the bad spacing appears disrespectful even of the marble on which it is carved, to say nothing of Pope Francis himself.

I would prefer to think that instead of the letters intentionally being letterspaced badly, perhaps another kind of mistake was made. Perhaps the spacing was chosen to be more legible since the monument is viewed normally from a shallow angle, as the photograph implies, rather than from directly overhead.

On another topic: today, the term "kerning" is indeed used for all aspects of the spacing between letters, since this is what the term means in digital typography tools. So I can't say it was incorrect, even though I personally found it jarring. To me, it seems like the wrong term, and I'd use "letterspacing" instead, reserving "kerning" to refer to the case where there is overlap between the bounding boxes of adjacent letters in response to white space within the bounding box due to its shape. The case that requires doing funny stuff when using metal type.

Kent Lew

I confess that I, too, find it disconcerting to have the term “kerning” used in common parlance to refer to all aspects of letter spacing. Unfortunately, this is probably something I’ll eventually have to get over — not unlike the conflation of “font” and “typeface” now, and the former being used to refer to all manner of lettering.

Relative to the spacing on the Pope Francis’s tomb, I noted elsewhere that this kind of spacing is what you get when you apply Adobe Optical Metrics to Times New Roman in InDesign.

Without an accurate, square-on image of the tomb lettering, it would be hard to assess whether it would be an exact match. But the pattern of [bad] adjustments is the same.

Peter Constable

If there are poets with a typographic bent, here's a line of iambic pentameter we might see used as a simile for something disappointing:

"like the kerning on the pope's tomb"

(For some reason, the title of this topic brought to mind the final line from Bruce Cockburn's song, Hoop Dancer, with its cultural reference:
"And just beyond the clatter and cars the last long notes of wild voices ring
Like Roland's horn")

Joshua Langman

That's not quite pentameter. A real line of pentameter would be something like "As awkward as the kerning on the tomb" or "As like unto the kerning on the tomb."

Craig Eliason

Kent Lew said:

Relative to the spacing on the Pope Francis’s tomb, I noted elsewhere that this kind of spacing is what you get when you apply Adobe Optical Metrics to Times New Roman in InDesign.

Without an accurate, square-on image of the tomb lettering, it would be hard to assess whether it would be an exact match. But the pattern of [bad] adjustments is the same.

The last image in the OP's Fast Company link persuades me that it's not optical metrics but equal sidebearings on every letter that doomed this.

Dave Crossland

Craig Eliason said:

The last image in the OP's Fast Company link persuades me that it's not optical metrics but equal sidebearings on every letter that doomed this.

My sister is a professional stone carver (josephinecrossland.com) and her first reaction was why would they do equal side bearings off the edge of each serif, lol

Kent Lew

Craig Eliason said:

The last image in the OP's Fast Company link persuades me that it's not optical metrics but equal sidebearings on every letter that doomed this.

Sure, that’s a compelling image. But it is a digital image. There is no comparison with a square-on photo of the actual tomb to show that the demonstration actually matches the tomb precisely, any more than my optical metrics demo does.

Either way, it’s bad.

Jens Kutilek

I've tried to un-distort an image of the inscription, and added equal rectangles between the letters. They are not all the same distance, see NC and VS which are noticeably more narrow.



(Source image)

Adam Ladd

Dave Crossland said:

My sister is a professional stone carver (josephinecrossland.com) and her first reaction was why would they do equal side bearings off the edge of each serif, lol

(Sorry to sidetrack) Dave, she has some great work! Really like some of her mix of type and imagery. That Welsh slate medium looks really nice.

Andreas Stötzner

When the Vatican uses Times for a pope’s tomb, the end of the world comes closer.

John Savard

I also tried to remove the distortion, and I placed actual Times New Roman letters below the carved ones for comparison:

It seemed to me that there was a large amount of space around the A, and also, to a lesser extent, around the V, which couldn't be explained by the use of any consistent rule, but which did exaggerate the optical effect found with those letters in the absence of kerning adjustments.

Peter Constable

Did anyone consider the possibility that it was intentional? The A points upwards, to heaven; the unusual spacing is noticeable, drawing people's attention to the letter telling them to look upwards?

James Montalbano

From the NY Times:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/04/world/europe/pope-francis-tomb-lettering.html?unlocked_article_code=1.E08.atDW.Y-kC__gwi4ot&smid=url-share

Simon Cozens

Peter Constable said:

Did anyone consider the possibility that it was intentional?

For a symbol to point to something else, it needs to point away from itself. (And the "pointing to heaven" interpretation would make more sense if the stone was upright, not flat.)

Above all, I think it's much easier to draw someone up to heaven with beauty instead of ugliness.

Peter Constable

From the NYT article:

“Why does it look like pressing on the letter ‘A’ will open a secret chamber where the ark of the covenant is stored?” asked Elle Cordova, a digital creator, comedy writer and grammarian

Did anyone try pressing the letter A?

;-)

PabloImpallari

This article reminded me of the time I studied psychology (I only completed a little more than half of the degree and then got bored). So I applied a little of what I learned there on this article, because my hypothesis is that when these topics reach the mass media, the interest is generally different, and these topics are used to push other ideas or agendas.

Let's analyze the NYTimes article. I asked GTP this:
I'm not interested in the typographic aspect here — not what's right or wrong with the spacing, nor how it was produced, none of that. What I want to explore instead is what other themes the article touches on or hints at tangentially… the underlying ideas the author may hold, the ideologies they promote, etc. In psychology school, they taught us to read not only what the author says, but also what they don’t say or what they leave out. Do you know what I mean? This is the exact opposite of how programming languages are read, where the code only expresses what it directly and unambiguously means.

The response:
Absolutely — what you're describing is symptomatic reading: looking for what is unspoken, displaced, repressed, or ideologically latent. It’s like reading a dream: not for what it shows on the surface, but for what it reveals underneath. Here's a breakdown of the article from that angle:

💬 Surface Theme (what the article seems to be about):

A humorous and technical critique of the letter spacing (kerning) on Pope Francis' tombstone. A “minor detail” that has caught the attention of typography nerds.

---

🧠 Latent Themes (what it says without saying):

1. Design as a symbolic power structure

• The article implies that even something as subtle as kerning carries symbolic weight. When done poorly, it reads not just as an aesthetic flaw but as institutional carelessness.

• There's an underlying ideology of design sacralization — where visual harmony is elevated to the level of moral virtue.

2. A veiled critique of the Church

• There's an unspoken mockery toward an institution that once shaped Western art and lettering… yet now can't commission a proper inscription.

• The typographic blunder becomes a metonym for institutional decay.

3. Tension between the sacred and the profane

• The article flips expectations: the sacred site (the Pope’s tomb) is ridiculed, while kerning — a secular, technical detail — is treated with reverence.

• This hints at a broader cultural shift where form triumphs over meaning.

4. The secularization of death

• The article avoids any mention of the Pope’s spiritual legacy. His death is reduced to a matter of typographic misalignment.

• This reflects a materialist ideology, where death is interpreted through aesthetics rather than metaphysics.

5. Cult of perfection and technical idealism

• The dramatic outrage (“an abomination unto design”) caricatures the modern design world’s obsession with precision and control.

• There's an implicit technocratic ethos: if something is visually flawed, it is deeply wrong — even in the context of a Pope's final resting place.

---

🕳️ What the author doesn’t say (and thereby reveals more):

• There’s no speculation that the poor spacing could be intentional — a symbolic gesture of humility or imperfection.

• There’s no reflection on the tomb’s simplicity as a spiritual message — it’s brushed aside in favor of aesthetic critique.

• There’s zero mention of suffering, mourning, or theological meaning. The Pope is flattened into a badly spaced name.

---

📌 Conclusion:

This article isn’t just about kerning. It’s a cultural critique disguised as design snark. It uses typographic failure to stage an ideological performance — one that elevates secular design values while sidelining spiritual ones. The error becomes a kind of design heresy — not theological, but aesthetic.

John Hudson

I think that GPT report is best if read aloud in Slavoj Žižek’s voice, especially the line ‘The Pope is flattened into a badly spaced name.’

Scott-Martin Kosofsky

It seems to me that poor spacing as a “symbol of humility” is similar to claiming that ransom note typography expresses universalist (I.e., catholic [lc]) sentiment. The disgraceful performance of lettering on Pope Francis’s tomb got me to thinking about what I would have done, and why. Stylistically speaking, Francis stood in opposition to the imperial papacy, so I don’t think it would have been appropriate to have inscribed his tomb with Imperial letters, whether directly in the manner of Trajan’s Column or in the manner of their 16th-century manifestations seen all over Rome. The better model, I thought, would be Republican letters, such as the ones inscribing the Baker’s Tomb. Looking for a typographic equivalent, I settled on Sumner Stone’s Magma. Here it is:

Russell McGorman

Peter Constable said:

comedy writer and grammarian

;-)

Seriously funny.

Russell McGorman

CAD-CAM apps that drive things like stone carving tools don't necessaraily acknowledge type metrics. (So, maybe not not typography?).

Here's a photo of the same problem on a larger (physical) scale. (Unlike the Pope's headstone, I'm the only person I know of to have complained about it) These letters are about 5 meters (16.5') tall and cast in the concrete cladding on the building. No stone carving tools involved, but, but it's an example of a type layout rendered in AutoCAD to create the production art.

Russell McGorman

Scott-Martin Kosofsky said:

... The better model, I thought, would be Republican letters, such as the ones inscribing the Baker’s Tomb. Looking for a typographic equivalent, I settled on Sumner Stone’s Magma. 

Thank you for that. "The Bakers tomb" took me down an interesting rabbit hole. What a fascinating structure.