Kern pair

Two specific letters whose spacing is corrected together, like AV or To. The unglamorous labour beneath clean-looking type.

Kerning is a craft of instances, and the kern pair is the instance: two specific letters whose fitted spacing lives in the font as a stored correction. A serious face carries thousands, AV and To and L' settled in advance so text composes cleanly on its own.

The pairs a font missed become the designer's inheritance, surfacing at display sizes in names, in headlines, in whatever word the layout enlarges. Our display setting is checked pair by pair before it ships; nobody will credit the corrected pairs, but everyone would feel the uncorrected ones.