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The Math of Text Readability
An anonymous reader writes "Wired magazine has an article that explains The Law of Optical Volumes, a formula for spacing the letters on a printed page that results in maximum readability. Wired's new logo (did anyone notice?) obeys the law. Unfortunately, Web fonts don't allow custom kerning pairs, so you can't work the same magic online as in print. Could this be why some people still prefer newspapers and magazines to the Web?"
I have actually written software to kern text (for the sign-making industry) and can testify that kerning is not an exact science. Yes, one needs to even up the areas of white space between letter, but then one needs to bias the calculations in favour of the tops of the letters. And then make some allowance for any white space inside the letters, and .... and .... and ..... Spacing that is correct for 12-point type on paper would be quite wrong for a huge 3D sign on the side of a building, and so on.
For perfection, there is no substitute for the human eye. The algorithms used by our brains to unscramble text are very complex.
I'm just running an incredibly modern-futuristic computer here, but my computer arranges letter closer together and further apart depending on their shapes... is that different from 'kerning'?
Related, but more different than not.
There are monospaced fonts, where each letter takes up the same amount of space regardless of shape, so xxx and iii are the same width. Then there are proportional fonts, where the letters are as wide as the rectangle it takes to contain them, so xxx is much wider than iii. This is what you're thinking of.
Kerning takes it a step further. A proportional font that doesn't have some kind of hinting (and a program that can read/implement that) will still put too much space between the letters VA, while one that does will allow the V and A to 'invade' each other's rectangle. It can get quite complex with all the different glyphs (letterforms) that have to work with each other.
I'm mystified as to who would say computers can't do this, since I use them to do exactly that every day. It really has more to do with the fonts and applications (and possibly the OS) you are using.
One man's -1 Flamebait is another man's +5 Funny.
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no it doesn't. It looks like it might when you just look at the two letters together... but it's just an illusion. (see above example).