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I wouldn't go that far; in The Elements of Typographic Style Robert Bringhurst mentions having to tweak the kerning of just about every typeface he's ever worke

I wouldn't go that far; in The Elements of Typographic Style Robert Bringhurst mentions having to tweak the kerning of just about every typeface he's ever worked with, and he's professionally associated with Adobe's typography department, so it's not like he's never worked with professionally-made typefaces. To make a software development analogy, manual kerning is a bit like writing your own HTTP client library from scratch. Any language you use probably already has a pretty good or a great one, so it's probably not worth your time unless you have a very specialist use-case, you want to learn how to do it yourself, or you're legitimately that much better than the original implementor.

jack_jennings 11y ago
I think that your analogy is slightly off, though true enough. I'd say that writing a low level library is more akin to actually drawing a typeface than it is to mucking with the spacing of an existing one. You won't learn a lot about what goes into properly spacing a typeface just through kerning, as you would by examining a lower level protocol and writing an implementation.
Chris_Newton 11y ago
Perhaps a more direct analogy would be that manual kerning is like hand-optimising code at a low level. You can improve almost anything to some degree, and an expert would be able to detect even quite small differences on close inspection. However, an isolated minor deviation would not make a significant difference in normal use, and the effort to hand-optimise everything is prohibitive. However, a user could notice either the cumulative effect of many suboptimal areas (poor built-in kerning in a font, careless inefficiency in frequently run code) or a single major problem (not tidying up a large logo or hero graphic, not optimising the body of a loop running many times causing a delay in UI response). In these cases, the benefit of manual refinement may be amplified enough to justify the effort.

jack_jennings 11y ago

I think that your analogy is slightly off, though true enough. I'd say that writing a low level library is more akin to actually drawing a typeface than it is to mucking with the spacing of an existing one. You won't learn a lot about what goes into properly spacing a typeface just through kerning, as you would by examining a lower level protocol and writing an implementation.

Chris_Newton 11y ago

Perhaps a more direct analogy would be that manual kerning is like hand-optimising code at a low level. You can improve almost anything to some degree, and an expert would be able to detect even quite small differences on close inspection. However, an isolated minor deviation would not make a significant difference in normal use, and the effort to hand-optimise everything is prohibitive. However, a user could notice either the cumulative effect of many suboptimal areas (poor built-in kerning in a font, careless inefficiency in frequently run code) or a single major problem (not tidying up a large logo or hero graphic, not optimising the body of a loop running many times causing a delay in UI response). In these cases, the benefit of manual refinement may be amplified enough to justify the effort.