A topic within Typography, itself one of 10 topics in that field and part of Design.
2 works
Matthew Butterick
Argues that kerning — adjusting the space inside specific letter pairs — is mostly a font's own job in modern software, so a typesetter's real skill is recognising the pairs a font gets wrong and correcting only those.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Matthew Butterick
Argues that adding uniform space between every letter — tracking, or letterspacing — should be reserved mainly for capitals and small caps, because it steadily degrades the readability of ordinary lowercase text.
link checked 17 Sept 2026