Kern

Alternatively known as kerning, kern describes the spacing between characters. Kerning is used to enhance the overall appearance of a typeface. For example, in the word "WAV," kerning bunches the letters together, taking less space and improving the look. Many advanced word processors, like Microsoft Word or LibreOffice Writer, support the ability to adjust character spacing.

Example of kerning

This text has kerning applied to it and should have additional spacing between each letter.

How to apply kerning in Microsoft Word

1. Open Microsoft Word.
2. Highlight the text you want to adjust.
3. Once highlighted, click Format, Font, and then the Character Spacing tab.
4. In this section, you can adjust the scale, spacing, position, or kerning on fonts above a specific size.

How to apply kerning to text on a web page

Kerning can be applied to any text using the letter-spacing CSS (cascading style sheets) attribute, as shown in the examples below.

<style>
 h1 {letter-spacing:2px;}
 .kern {letter-spacing:3px;}
</style>

In the example above, the H1 HTML (hypertext markup language) tag and the kern class has additional kerning. If you add that CSS code to your HTML page, then add the "kern" class to a paragraph element, the text appears as shown below.

<p class="kern">This text has kerning</p>

Font, Typography terms