Re: "Kerning?"

[Robert Holmgren holmgren@xxxxxxxx]

** Reply to note from "..."  Sun, 16 Feb 1997

>> The term for what you dudes are trying to do with the wrong tools is
>> letterspacing, not kerning. 				--a

> << Kerning is actually the reduction of space between letters (I believe
> it arose from the problem that italics tend to create too much space;
> properly, the upper portion of an italic character should overhang
> the bottom of the next character, and to get that effect with cold type,
> you needed to pare down the right "corner" of the shank).

> Robert--Kerning pre-dates cold type by centuries and is used to make type
> more readable by balancing the optical (vs physical) space between
> characters . . .  Nothing to do with itals.

In Holland the old drukkersknecht (journeymen printers) called cast type
koudrukschrift, "cold letters". By cold, I mean foundry type. I was a
summer intern at Mouton & Co in Den Haag almost forty years ago, where some
books were still being hand printed in a conscious claim to the Haarlem
tradition of the punch, the matrix, and the mould. Those guys said
that kerning started at the end of the 17th
century in response to the fashion for italics. They said (and I
believed!) that "kern" derived from French carne or cardo (however its
spelled), which meant "corner" or "hinge". That kerning -- philosophy
aside -- acquired its whole meaning in the working, with a chisel or file,
of the shank of movable type, the shank being the metal (rarely wooden)
body underneath a cast character. That founders pared the carne of the
shank so that the next shank (next character) lay more snugly against it; a
part of the stem and serifs of the "face" would thus overhang the shank
(the character on the left over the char on the right). They were adamant
that oldtime founders hated kerned type, because kerning created burr
(roughness on the side of the shank) that rendered type useless; moreover
that you had to categorize kerned type with various discreet nicks (little
troughs on the "belly" or front of the shank), because a kern would fit
beside some characters, but not others -- altogether, a pain in the a. But
that italics demanded kerning of _every_ character, so these problems were
eliminated entirely. Anyway, chars like WA or ligatures like ffi were
always cast as whole multicharacter units -- never kerned -- a genuine vestige
the woodblock tradition from which movable type developed.

BTW, what does "dude" mean to you? Not part of my vocabulary. I
believe this term applies specifically to males?


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Robert Holmgren
holmgren@xxxxxxxx
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