The default behavior of most browsers is to disable kerning and ligatures wherever the letter-spacing property is applied. Enabling ligatures fixes this problem by combining the separate letters into a single glyph and merging the two crossbars into one. If you look closely at the ff and ft pairs in the second word liftoff, you’ll see an awkward gap between their crossbars. In a very tight setting, however, ligatures can stand out as noticeably wider than other letters. Ligatures are often narrower than their two related characters, so they look right at home in lightly tightened type. In this example, we’re much better off using the version of liftoff that doesn’t contain ligatures. It’s best to avoid them altogether in loosely letterspaced type. As a result, ligatures end up looking clumped together within a word. Ligatures are always a fixed width, but you can still letterspace the type surrounding them. That’s not to say you shouldn’t letterspace type containing ligatures, but there are a couple considerations to keep in mind. Since ligatures are the combined form of two or more letters, and letterspacing adjusts the space in between those letters, you end up with two typesetting techniques that are at cross-purposes. Kerning becomes a nice-to-have here, instead of a necessity. If we look at the same word Tomato - now set with positive letterspacing - the difference is too subtle to make an impact. Kerning becomes less important as letterspacing increases, and at a certain point, it’s barely even noticeable. Enabling kerning here tightens up the initial spacing and improves the overall look and feel of the word. It looks awkward in an otherwise tightly spaced context. In the example above, there’s a noticeable gap between the unkerned T and o pair at the beginning of the word Tomato. Tight letterspacing exaggerates the need for kerning, so if you make negative adjustments to the letter-spacing property, you should probably enable kerning, too. By enabling kerning alone, you can often decrease the horizontal spacing in a line of type - similar to reducing letterspacing. The majority of kerning decreases the space present between letters. These elements attract the most attention in a design, so it’s important to get their details just right when typesetting. It’s a good practice to enable kerning in titles, headings, and other display type. Now with that out of the way, let’s jump right into the rules for letterspacing type with kerning and ligatures. I’d recommend checking out the last one if you want a quick overview of using letterspacing on the web. This article is a follow-up and much more focused, so bear that in mind as you continue reading. I recently wrote an article about the general guidelines for letterspacing type on the web.
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