Kerning

The design of graphic characters so that their character boxes overlap. The toned picture elements (pels) of the character appear outside the character cell.

Note

Kerning allows character boxes to overlap and characters to run together, so that characters can be designed for cursive languages, ligatures, or any other kind of character that requires more than one character box. It also allows for design of proportional-spaced fonts. By overlapping character boxes, characters can be placed closer together, or they can be placed farther apart by using overlapped blank character boxes.