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by earnubs
5206 days ago
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You are free to disagree, you're still wrong. Kerning and tracking are about the space between two letters, adjusted dependent on the form of the letters in question to reduce the appearance of gaps between same. Letter-spacing is the overall spacing between letters and is again purely visual, used to prevent unsightly gaps toward the end of the line in justified text or to make uppercase titles easier to read. The only meaning you might possibly want to convey to an unsighted user regarding letter-spacing is a propensity for sheep rustling (however blackletter isn't a popular style on the web). |
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If, for instance, uppercase text requires wider spacing, the browser — or better still, the font renderer — should work that out; the designer should not have to explicitly tell it things like that.
Since, in any case, most manual typography is already algorithmic (if such-and-such condition, the spacing needs to be increased), and since the 'judgement calls' about the aesthetics of type are already encoded into the font by the foundry, manual typography outside the foundry is /obsolete/: machines can do it better, because they can use optimisation algorithms to find the best trade-offs (compare, for instance, TeX's line-breaking algorithm to the common manual approach of "first-fit, but backtrack if the solution is too poor").