Why OpenOffice.org needs Kerning

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Kerning is part of the typesetting process, where the space between character glyphs is adjusted to the appearance of the glyph and its neighbour. For example, when a V is followed by an A, the shape of the glyphs would result in a little too much space between them, and this just doesn't look nice. The A should be moved a little towards the V.

This text is not kerned:
LVAT without kerning
As you can see, the space between the glyphs is just too wide.

This text is kerned:
LVAT with kerning
Now, the spacing between the glyphs looks more natural and eye-pleasing.
For most other glyphs, the necessary corrections are much smaller. But the resultant text will always look nicer and be easier to read, although most people will not be able to explain exactly why.

Kerning is controlled by information in the font data (in particular the font metrics). Fonts that do not need such precise corrections, like fixed width fonts, will not be subject to kerning.

OpenOffice.org supports kerning, but does not do this by default. You have to specify for each document and each style whether to use kerning or not. This is a big hassle. Not many users will do this.

As a result, when OpenOffice.org is used to produce a printed document, it will not look as nice as if it had been printed by, for example, Microsoft Office. This will make people believe that OpenOffice.org produces inferior results, and people will stick to Office.

OpenOffice.org has a lot of features, and most of them are enabled by default. Despite several discussions on the mailing lists I still haven't heard one single argument for not enabling kerning by default on new documents. The kerning status of existing OOo documents may not be changed since that would (theoretically) lead to small changes in the documents. But there is no reason to not enable kerning by default on all newly created documents, including documents converted from MS-Office formats since MS-Office has kerning enabled as well.

Edit January 2007: The next version will have kerning enabled by default. Finally.