Kerning is the adjustment of individual pairs of letters to improve the spacing and fit. Most fonts come with hundreds (and sometimes thousands) of kerning pairs inserted by the font designer.
In the samples below, notice how the kerning pairs tighten the large gaps that occur between certain letter pairs so that they’re consistent with the rest of the font.
For the best look, you want to use these kerning pairs. But by default, kerning is not activated in Word or WP (no idea why) so you have to turn it on yourself.
To turn on kerning:
In Word: go to the Font dialog box, select the Character Spacing tab, and check the box that says Kerning for Fonts.
In WP: go to the Format menu, select Typesetting, select Word / Letter Spacing, and check the box that says Automatic Kerning.
(Full disclosure: This is right from the WP manual, but it had no effect when I tried it on my copy of WP X3. I find working with WP about as much fun as training a terrier, so WP lovers, you’re on your own from here.)
If you get a complete font set, such as Adobe Garamond Pro, they have already included common kerning pairs.
Some, and perhaps all, versions of WordPerfect for Windows (see http://www.wpuniverse.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=15049) will print kerned text correctly once kerning has been turned on, but will not change its appearance on screen.
Yep — you can take the WP out of the MS-DOS, but you can’t take the MS-DOS out of the WP.
I wonder what happen when the user turn the kerning on in Word 2007 (with OpenType fonts). Does Word use the original kerning pairs inserted by the font designer? In fact it could apply some standard kerning pairs designed by Microsoft for categories of fonts (serif, sans-serif)…
In Word for Mac: Open the Normal.dotm file, by navigating to Users//Library/Application Support/Microsoft/Office/User Templates, and make the appropriate changes for Kerning (as described in the article). Otherwise, any settings made are only applied to that particular “document1.xxx” (i.e. session). By changing the Normal.dotm file you can control all the default settings, not just kerning, but the font family, size of font, margins, etc. For more info on tweaking the Normal.dotm file to your preferences visit: http://www.microsoft.com/mac/help.mspx
For Word 2007/2010 (on XP, at least) to modify the base template file, in Word’s open dialog, navigate to:
C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Application Data\Microsoft\Templates
(Substitute your username in the obvious place. Additionally, you may need to enable viewing hidden files/folders to see the Application Data folder) Modify the “Normal.dotm” file (if you have extensions enabled).