news@sun.uucp (news) (07/10/87)
Date: Thu, 9 Jul 87 16:03:04 EDT
From: unipress!erika!gjb@RUTGERS.EDU ( Greg Brail)
I've been reading the discussion about the relative merits of justified vs.
ragged-right text. Personally, I've always been told that ragged-right is
easier to read. That's not my point, though.
In many cases, even "real typesetters" don't kern all their text. Many
newspapers, magazines, and even books made with expensive hardware do not have
all the text kerned. Usually, only larger point sizes are kerned, since
there's very little difference with small type. Although kerning improves the
quality of the text, looking up every character pair in a kerning table eats up
processing power real fast. Just look at the PostScript output from PageMaker
2.0 with kerning on to see what I mean. Although PageMaker 2.0 only kerns
certain pairs, it takes quite a bit of PostScript to do it.
So the question remains: is it really that important that we kern our body
text? Or can we live with faster, cheaper unkerned text? Has anyone seen
studies on the matter? My guess is that kerned text is easier to read, but the
difference is not terribly significant.
-Greg
--------
Greg Brail UniPress Software
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