Friday, November 9, 2012

Letter Spacing...

I must admit that this is something I've never really thought much about before: the amount of spacing between typeset letters (like the ones you're reading right now).  I have occasionally noticed typeset text that looked “wrong” – and on close inspection, realized that was wrong was the spacing.  But truthfully I've never paid much attention to it.

Reading this fascinating post, I've learned that so far setting “correct” letter spacing remains an art.  By that I mean that type artists set the spacing through some process that they can't set down on paper, and that (so far, at least) nobody knows how to write a computer program to do it automatically.  That I found quite surprising, as it seems like the sort of thing that would be amenable to algorithmic attack.  Apparently not!  Or at least, not yet...

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