Kerning that makes you cringe...

[hellymedic]

"A lady driver behind the coach called me and said there was a flame coming out of the light duster."

From https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-suffolk-64552896

[rafletcher]

Zooming in that looks like a misprint.

[Beardy]

When viewed on my fondleslab, the article does indeed say duster. I suspect it’s a scanning or handwriting to text error.

[Cudzoziemiec]

Typo, I'd say, but never mind. We needed a kerning thread.

[Kim]

FTFY

[Jurek]

I see what you did there.

[Cudzoziemiec]

Kim, you are very clad!

[Beardy]

Kim, you are very bacl!

ftfy 

[Pickled Onion]

One thing that does `wind me up' if not quite `make me cringe' is when people use the backtick as if it were a left quote mark. It doesn't kern properly for the simple reason it's not for use in text, it's a special character for programming. It looks even worse where the font doesn't slope the character they use for the right quote, and always makes me stumble and backtrack when reading.

[Kim]

Shirley it's for adding accents and was appropriated by the programmers who could only count to 0x7F and therefore couldn't do any of that FOREIGN rubbish anyway.  And then some other programmers invented character sets and the <compose> key and restored its original purpose.  And then someone who may or may not have been a programmer, but was definitely being sloppy used a glyph that was the mirror image of a ''' in a popular operating system, and the rot set in.

But yes.  Almost as annoying as when certain software (chiefly Microsoft Word and random Fruity products) decides to substitute the usual quote characters with the chiral ones when you're trying to write computer documentation.

[rogerzilla]

No kerning thread is complete without Megaflicks.

https://www.reddit.com/r/keming/comments/8zpk7s/megaflicks_or_megafucks/

At primary school, the hymns were written by hand on big sheets of sugar paper.  For the first three years, I was singing "Bom of the one light, Eden saw play".  I thought they'd spelt Bomb wrongly.

[Cudzoziemiec]

The way in which, as children*, we unthinkingly accept misread or misheard hymn lyrics that don't make the tiniest bit of sense, is worthy of its own thread. But not this one.

*Perhaps as adults too, but hymn-singing tends to be more of a voluntary activity once you've left school.

[T42]

Reading "burned to the ground" and thinking "That should be a double M".

[Mr Larrington]

The notion of Reading being set ablaze bringeth good cheer on a murky morn in E17

[T42]

My life has not been in vain.

[Ian H]

Kerning was originally an old Cornish sport.  My Kernow & SW event pays homage to it.

[cygnet]

 

[citoyen]

As mentioned elsewhere...


Kerning disaster by citoyen, on Flickr

[Pickled Onion]

I see what you mean.

The whole right section needs to move left, the final "s" is over the margin. Horribly asymmetrical.

[TheLurker]

Almost as annoying as when certain software (chiefly Microsoft Word and random Fruity products) decides to substitute the usual quote characters with the chiral ones when you're trying to write computer documentation.

Annoying doesn't come close, bloody infuriating begins to get nearer but even that doesn't quite cover it.  Every time I get a new work machine I spend hours switching off all the oh so very, very helpful,  "Let me do what I think you want to do rather than letting you actually do what you want to do." bollocks.

[Wowbagger]

I've just read the entire thread and I'll just say that it doesn't mean a thing to me.

[Feanor]

I've just read the entire thread and I'll just say that it doesn't mean a thing to me.

You could just google 'kerning'.

Fonts (yes, yes..) come in 2 general classes: Monospaced, and Proportional.

Monospaced means every character takes up the same width on the page. Like a typewriter. So I and W both occupy the same width. This has advantages, and dis-advantages. It makes tables line up nicely.
And this is one of the reasons for serifs on fonts; the little horizontal wings on the top and bottom of the 'I' glyph: to make them seem a little less out-of-place in monospaced text.
Proportional fonts vary the width of the glyphs. So I is narrower than W.

Now, kerning is how you adjust the space (and sometimes overlap) between individual glyphs. It's a visual thing. Mostly, it goes un-noticed, because typographers have done the work to make it so. But sometimes, it's done badly and is visually jarring.

[ian]

Properly laying out type is an art we've mostly given up on the Web where everything is rendered automatically [ugly].


It makes me a bit sad to know there are now entire generations who haven't seen a proper, exquisitely printed page, and most of the people who did that are either retired or dead.

[Diver300]

https://datasheets.kyocera-avx.com/AVX-SCC.pdf
The spacing of the thread size of "M16" made me think that the studs on the capacitor were M6, which I thought was a suitably chunky size, and I bought eyelets with 6mm holes.

[sam]

This kerning krime should be easy to spot [click image to magnify my embarrassment]:



Light Reading was a 'zine I produced in the 90s from my home at the time, Jersey City, NJ. It was self-published in the most literal sense: I did everything but man the printing press. I was, believe it or not


Not

a professional typesetter at the time. In my defence, I was too busy writing to pay much attention to such mundane details as THE MASTHEAD. That it never got past Vol. 1, Issue 1, probably didn't have anything to do with kerning.


Brought the tools of the trade with me across the pond.